Dear CC People,
I am looking for ways to prevent a free website from turning commercial in the long run.
Would a NonCommercial CC license be an appropriate way for this? Would it also still be possible to keep some portions of the site "private" for the user or some specified group of users? Has anybody already seen something like that?
Any ideas and help are greatly appreciated!
Hi nikita-br,
Depends on lots of things. Do you run the site in question? If not, applying a CC NC license to your contributions to the site may not matter if the site has some other ToS that you've agreed to. Certainly a site can arrange for some data to be public (and some or all of that under one or more of the CC licenses) and some data private. You'll have to describe the situation in more detail.
Somewhat tangential, but for community sites that do turn commercial, I cannot recommend Evan Prodromou's "Commercialization of Wikis" (really applies to any community site) presentation highly enough, see http://evan.prodromou.name/Talks/SXSW07
Hello Mike Linksvayer,
thank you for your response and for pointing me to the presentation. I am planning a non-commercial social networking site and now gather advice from experienced people so I can put together the right ToS and licensing model.
The reason I'd like this site to have some sort of a legal mechanism that will prevent it from going commercial is that I could become interested in some other project one day and will have to hand over this site to someone else. So, I'd like to make sure no ads and no paid accounts will emerge on the website.
I see. Well I imagine (this is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer) that if instead of your ToS saying you can do whatever you want with contributed content you have users agree to a CC BY-NC license AND yourself use the content under that license, it would then not be possible to take the site commercial without removing all of the content (or getting permission from all of the users) first.
I'm sure given enough time someone will suggest how you can accomplish this end using BY-SA instead of BY-NC. :)
What do you mean by "using BY-SA instead of BY-NC". Is that just a joke or is it a real alternative? (both would be OK)
It is a joke and a real alternative.
The joke is that often when someone proposes using BY-NC, someone else will jump in and explain why they should use BY-SA instead. This forum is new, but you can see many instances of that on CC mailing lists.
It is also a real alternative, but will take some rethinking on your part. If your bottom line is simply preventing anything that looks like commerce around the content, NC does that, but it also discourages uses that you might want and that would be good for the broader commons, and there is a fair amount of disagreement about what actually constitutes "noncommercial" use.
The BY-SA people would argue that you shouldn't really want to prevent any and all commerce, but to ensure that content remains in and builds the commons, which is what BY-SA does. If a commercial entity builds on work but is forced by the license to contribute it back under the same license, that should be for the good, unless you just hate commerce -- or something along those lines.
If you're interested in that perspective I suggest checking out http://freedomdefined.org/Definition and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft -- and their perspective on NC at http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC
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