the choice of license: All contributors would have to be contacted for a new negotiation. In our experience, the proportion of contributions which cannot be reached, have lost interest, never meant to market their contribution (having misunderstood the purpose of NC), or are unwilling to consent is relatively high. The contributions of these, which may be intermediate revisions of a text, then have to be laboriously removed.
Creative Commons is aware of the problems with NC licenses. Within the context of the upcoming version 4.0 of Creative Commons licenses (Peters 2011), it considers various options of reform (Linksvayer 2011b; Dobusch 2011):
- hiding the NC option from the license chooser in the future, thus formally retiring the NC condition
- dropping the BY-NC-SA and BY-NC-ND variant, leaving BY-NC the only non-commercial option
- rebranding NC licenses as something other than CC; perhaps moving to a “non-creativecommons.org” domain as a bold statement
- clarifying the definition of NC
The authors of this article view NC licenses as a valid choice. Without them, many works would not be publicly licensed at all. However, NC licenses should no longer be presented as an obvious or easy choice. Rather than abandoning NC licenses, we would prefer Creative Commons to rename and rebrand them, reducing the mismatch between the actual consequences and the expectations generated by terms like “non-commercial” and “creative commons”. A combination of: 1) a name like “Non-Open Commons: Attribution-Commercial Rights Reserved, NCC BY-CR”, 2) explanations on the license chooser highlighting potential misunderstanding, and 3) a visual design change in the license display of the short and long license texts (e.g. red-gray striped instead of yellow) might better communicate the actual consequences. Independently, a clarification of the license terms, stating that uses of NC-licensed works by organizations certified as charities or non-profit organizations for the purpose of taxation in their country of residence are always appropriate, might help to reduce the risk of using NC-licensed works. Such a clarification should not change the NC license by making the use of NC licensed words dependent on the status of the user. It should only clarify that certification by taxation authorities is a sufficient test to evaluate primary versus secondary intentions. Finally, a license update should attempt to clarify the borders of collections, and contain guidelines how to document the license status of collections containing a mixture of incompatible licenses.
Given such changes, we hope that the preference for NC-licensing by publicly funded organization who can afford to provide materials into an Open Content Commons is waning. We believe NC licenses should not be used for the dissemination of results from publicly-funded organizations or research projects. The public rightfully expects a return for its investments in the form of re-usable digital content. This is the new digital infrastructure of the information era.
