I do despair of some folks' literacy when I see all these posts complaining that adopting a license saying "do anything you want as long as you provide credit" allows other people and companies to make money off your work. So now we need a CC-BY-BG license: bad guys (Big Corporations) don't get to make money off your stuff, but other companies do?
Or, I suppose, only people, not companies. Admittedly, the implications of NC (noncommercial) have always been/will always be iffy, but BY itself should be pretty clear. I guess not.
- walt crawford
And here's where an attempt to engage on Twitter is, I think, failing/making me seem harsher than I wish. To me, "commercial use allowed" (how Flickr abbreviates CC-BY and how CC uses yes/no for license choice) would seem to say SO CLEARLY that commercial use is allowed that I'm hard-put to buy "but not COMMERCIAL use" as a complaint. Although, as I say there, maybe CC should think about a CC BY-NP option ("use allowed by individuals and nonprofit organizations, but not for-profit corporations").
- walt crawford
Yeah, I'm with you. I have always used BY-NC-SA. But I don't find non-commercial to be a particularly confusing notion.
- laura x
The confusing part of NC is all the edge cases--e.g., I use your image in a talk for which I'm being paid or for which my costs are being covered, or I use your text in C&I, which has received donations at times, or... (and, of course, if it's SA, I can't quote freely because C&I is *not* SA.) Still, BY-NC is what I use when I'm not using BY.
- walt crawford