NC
See also [1]ND.
In the context of [2]licenses the acronym NC stands for non-commercial and
means "only non-commercial use allowed", which is an unpopular limitation
that makes such a license by definition [3]proprietary (i.e. NOT a [4]free
cultural license). This means that a work shared under a license with NC
clause is prohibited from being used commercially (which itself is a very
unclear statement), greatly limits the freedom of such work and opens the
door for legal fuzziness and therefore possible bullying. The NC
limitation appears most notably in two [5]Creative Commons licenses: CC
BY-NC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND; again, despite these licenses being Creative
Commons, they are NOT [6]free as in freedom licenses -- note that this is
not an opinion or controversial statement, NC licenses very clearly break
the consensual definition of free cultural works and Creative Commons
themselves clearly state this is the case; they justify NC licenses as
part of the proprietary-free license spectrum, standing somewhere in
between "all rights reserved" and free cultural licenses. Even though to
free culture newcomers NC licenses don't seem like such a big deal, they
are in fact extremely [7]harmful to free culture, DO NOT USE NC LICENSES.
NC is similar (and similarly harmful) to another proprietary license
limitation: [8]ND (no derivatives allowed). If you use an NC license,
you're a huge cocksucker.
Why are NC licenses bad? Firstly the Definition of Free Cultural Works
project that maintains the widely accepted definition of free culture has
an article on this: https://freedomdefined.org/Definition. Let us write a
summary of the arguments ALONG WITH [9]our own arguments:
* "Commercial use" isn't just selling, it possibly prohibits beneficial
uses you would want to allow. Imagine you create e.g. an educational
image that you would like many people to see -- by using an NC license
you will however prohibit for example other people from showing the
image on social media if they are people who make money from social
media, for example YouTubers that make money from ads on their videos
will be prohibited (or at least greatly discouraged) from showing your
educational image in their videos, you may also rule out use by
ethical non-profits who still need to make some money to sustain
themselves etc. Of course, the author may allow commercial use in
individual cases and "on the go", in the spirit of [10]permission
culture, however this may be practically impossible in cases of big
collaborative works similar to e.g. [11]Wikipedia with possibly
thousands of authors.
* It is very unclear what commercial use means which opens door to legal
fear and avoidance of NC works. "Commercial use" may be interpreted
not just as directly selling the work but as doing pretty much
anything with the work that somehow, even indirectly, leads to some
kind of profit -- consider e.g. printing an NC picture on your shirt
(allowed by the NC license) and then wearing that shirt while
promoting something you're selling -- if such shirt could be seen as
helping you get attention of more customers and so result in making
more money, you're potentially violating the license and the author
can sue you. I.e. by using NC works you will always have to worry to
not come close to anything that could be seen, even by a stretch, as a
"commercial use". This is a worry that will exist as long as copyright
on the work, i.e. certainly for your whole life. For this reason
people simply avoid using such works and even choose to use lower
quality works that don't pose such dangers. Using an NC license will
therefore make your work much less popular, less visible and, of
course, much less useful.
* It makes the work incompatible with other licenses. Works under NC
license cannot be included in free cultural works, for example text
written on the Citizendium encyclopedia (licensed NC) cannot be copied
to Wikipedia (licensed free under CC-BY-SA).
* It adds huge legal [12]bloat. Similarly to e.g. [13]copyleft, the NC
clause has to either be very vague and unclear or extremely long and
complex in explaining what it really means. This of course leads to
unclarities, legal bugs, confusion, payments of lawyers etc.
* It strengthens the idea of [14]intellectual property. The basic aim of
free culture is to relax "intellectual property" laws, not to
strengthen them or continue the ways of [15]permission culture,
therefore the strict NC limitation is very unpopular among proponents
of free culture. We, [16]LRS, strongly reject the very idea of being
able to own information, so stricter legal conditions are always worse
in our view.
* NC license may be in some cases worse than no license at all. Even
though Creative Commons NC licenses give basic rights such as that for
non-commercial sharing, the explicit prohibition of commercial use may
in specific cases result in more harm than if there was no license
attached to the work, because breaking a rule that's stated explicitly
may in court be seen as a bit more serious and intentional than
breaking an implicit rule. (Similar reasoning was used to reject
[17]CC0 by [18]OSI.)
* NC license is [19]proprietary, i.e. all arguments against proprietary
works apply.
* ...
{ Nice parody is the CC BY-NV license :D
https://questioncopyright.org/cc-by-nv/trackback.html ~drummyfish }
See Also
* [20]ND
* [21]CC BY-NV
Links:
1. nd.md
2. license.md
3. proprietary.md
4. free_culture.md
5. creative_commons.md
6. free_culture.md
7. harmful.md
8. nd.md
9. lrs.md
10. permission_culture.md
11. wikipedia.md
12. bloat.md
13. copyleft.md
14. intellectual_property.md
15. permission_culture.md
16. lrs.md
17. cc0.md
18. osi.md
19. proprietary.md
20. nd.md
21. cc_by_nv.md