@Richard : “… I happened to use several images from Wikimedia. Thus, everyone who chose an NC license BLOCKED my use of their work.”

Richard, wouldn’t it be equally correct that SA restricted your use? In fact SA even blocks other types of SA.

@Aaron : “SA is completely inappropriate for many types of works, it doesn’t work for most reuses of images or any other work which is presented in a completed form.”

@Richard : “SA is also adequate to discourage exploitive commercial use, thus reducing the need for the highly problematic and restrictive NC license.”

Richard, you are making a personal value judgement that may be inappropriate in many situations. As a software developer, I appreciate SA but think it is often absurdly applied to prose. I host websites that republish copyrighted material in digital form. When negotiating with publishers I am often given only two options: “commercial rights reserved” or “not available”.

I understand fully.

You wrote: “There is no confusion in the mind of many that use the NC license or the ND licence … they are using the NC licence to exclude a cost-free use by commercial corporations whilst allowing others.”

And thus, the NC license is failing them. I made a video that was completely non-commercial, and it happened to use several images from Wikimedia. Thus, everyone who chose an NC license BLOCKED my use of their work. So the last part of what you wrote, “allowing others” was a failure. NC failed to achieve what you and I both understand to be the goal of choosing NC. Furthermore, I only know for certain that my use was blocked and have no evidence that the photos I considered were even of interest to any commercial corporation. It is fully possible that the only effect of these photographers choosing NC was the blocking my non-commercial use.

You also wrote: “SA is completely inappropriate for many types of works, it doesn’t work for most reuses of images or any other work which is presented in a completed form.”

I have no idea what you mean here. SA works perfectly fine for images or videos or complete works of any type. The additional point is that SA is also adequate to discourage exploitive commercial use, thus reducing the need for the highly problematic and restrictive NC license.

You wrote: “NC is used by many in an attempt to ward off enclosure of the Commons and share-cropping by corporate interests.”

You are misunderstanding here. ONLY the SA term wards off enclosure of the commons. NC does not serve that function.

Before addressing Stephen’s comment, I’d like to say it’s great to see Creative Commons engaging this issue so seriously, and the proposed actions seem very constructive (especially the rebranding of NC as “Commercial Rights Reserved”). A blog comment probably isn’t the place to address all the pros and cons of the non-free licenses, so I won’t do so here, but CC’s own summary in the CC wiki lays out the issues very well.

Stephen, I think your definition of freedom is idiosyncratic and would not be recognized by most people who use and distributed CC resources, even under the non-free (meaning -NC and/or -ND) licenses. It’s simply not true that NC license guarantee the material will be accessible without cost — even if monetary cost were the only important component of freedom, which it’s not. When material is licensed in a way that allows commercial use without permission having to be asked first, all sorts of possibilities open up!

Take translation, for example:

I wrote a book that was published under CC-BY-SA, and it has had subsidized translations made and was then published and sold in some EU markets. It is unlikely the organizations that funded this work would have done so if they had not had a clear license requiring no negotiation (in part because the resultant derivative works themselves could not have been freely licensed if the original were not). The overhead of rights negotiation is a serious obstacle to unanticipated, permission-free sharing and derivation that has commercial aspects — and much real-world activity inevitably has commercial aspects.

This is not necessarily an argument that the non-free licenses should not be available. My point is that the two halves of your last sentence do not go together: “It should be retained, and promoted as equally open and equally free.”. Maybe the non-free licenses should be retained… But they are not equally open and equally free when compared with the truly free licenses, and CC is absolutely right not to promote them as such.

In this way a user can list CC works published using commercial or non-commercial hosting services. When used commercially the marking with attribution and ID wold provide a key to find the full rights and users can follow and learn from the usage of the CC work over the world.

I don’t suggest setting up file hosting or some file verification system (md5sum). A simple WordPress trackback system open for user registration should be enough where the complete license and link to original file could be published. This is also a way to ensure that works marked CC can be verified even after a users account on other hosts are removed for some reason.

Just a way to look at the problem on the flipside and se whats missing and causing confusion. Shared under CC.

NC is used by many in an attempt to ward off enclosure of the Commons and share-cropping by corporate interests.

That said, it is much harder to get rid of them now that they are here. Working to emphasize the Free licenses may be better than simply cutting off NC at version 3.0. It’s impossible to delete the existence of the past licenses. It would have been nice for the original CC not to be so convoluted with multiple license options. These are lessons new systems can try to learn from. But we do have to live with things where they are, and we don’t want to divide the community any more than is inevitable.

The message I want to spread is: “choosing NC means you are stopping anyone from mixing this with content from Wikipedia, even when the use is fully non-commercial. This is because NC is incompatible with the BY-SA license. Most concerns about exploitation of your work by commercial interests are adequately addressed by BY-SA.”

That’s quite simple. If everyone choosing NC acknowledges this effect, then fine, we can keep the NC as an option. Whether it should be renamed CRR, I don’t know. I see the arguments on both sides of that. I certainly wish it had been named CRR originally.

And yes: NC stops use. Some artists WANT that. They want to keep their professional competition from using their work while still allowing their fans to use it. That is a real wish – it’s not compatible with free culture, but it is a wish people actually have.

So let them mark their works NC. That’s a clear indicator for me to stay away from them, so I can avoid wasting time. By marking their works NC, they add a technical identifier which my browser could use in the future to tell me that a given link is not worth navigating to – while showing others that the given link contains stuff they are allowed to give to their friends and maybe use in a private blog.

I personally hate seeing NC and ND, but I hate it much, much, much less than seeing no CC license at all!

To put it differently: If you use NC and ND, you are already in the club of the cool people who allow me to give your works to my friends. You are just not in my fraction, which wants to foster a professional community of people who use free works.

And I like it that the license chooser shows that NC and ND are not considered free. With that every user of those licenses knows, that there are people who will not accept their works as real part of the commons, so they don’t get surprised later.

I think informing users is much better than taking options away. Informing people shapes society. Taking options away just splits it.