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German Court Says Creative Commons 'Non-Commercial' Licenses Must Be Purely For Personal Use
from the YMMV dept
Creative Commons licenses have been hugely successful in allowing people to share their creations in ways otherwise impossible using traditional copyright monopolies. But one problem remains unresolved: what exactly does the "non-commercial" license allow you to do? This lack of clarity has led various people to advocate avoiding the use of CC-NC. Back in 2012, Techdirt reported on a call to drop completely both the non-commercial and the no-derivatives licenses. In the same year, a group of German copyright experts released in collaboration with Wikimedia a document entitled "Consequences, Risks, and side-effects of the license module Non-Commercial -- NC", which was made available in an English translation the following year (PDF).
Now a German court has weighed in on the subject, with interesting results (original in German.) The case concerned the use of a photo from Flickr, released under a CC-BY-NC license. The photo appeared on the Web site of Deutschlandradio, part of the German public broadcaster -- a non-commercial organization, that is. Alongside the photo, Deutschlandradio's Web site included the name of the artist, the license, and a link to its terms. Despite this, the photographer demanded 310 Euros plus costs on the grounds that Deutschlandradio had used the photo for commercial purposes.
The public broadcaster pointed out that there was no charge for its Web site, there was no advertising, and no sponsorship. Nonetheless, the judge agreed it should be treated as a commercial use. In coming to this view, the judge drew on German law, which defined "non-commercial" as purely for personal use, and excluded all commercial use in the "generally accepted sense", and that apparently included radio stations, irrespective of how they were funded.
As this underlines, quite what "non-commercial" means is likely to vary from country to country, and possibly even judge to judge. Yet another reason to avoid using CC-BY-NC altogether.
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Version?
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Re: Version?
Quote from the CC legalcode:
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Re: Version?
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what?
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Re: what?
I am part of the problem, so are you, but the biggest problem is the electorate being low information to nothing more than partyline voters... to hell with any form of integrity so long as we get our way.
To most... the end, does in fact, justify the means!
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Re: what?
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So, is a "personal" blog on the WWW also "commercial"?
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Re: So, is a "personal" blog on the WWW also "commercial"?
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Re: Re: So, is a "personal" blog on the WWW also "commercial"?
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Re: Re: Re: So, is a "personal" blog on the WWW also "commercial"?
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The court is saying that this is what that license (that the artist chose) means in Germany.
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IANAL, etc., but that's the way I presume it would happen.
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Maybe the rest of the world doesn't agree with USA definitions?
Maybe something can be non-commercial and non-personal at the same time?
Personal use means just yourself doesn't it? If you have a medical marijuana license, I assume they are for personal use like other prescriptions, does that mean you can share with your friends and your license covers their use as well?
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Public broadcaster
Sure, these commericals are, thankfully, much shorter and less obnoxious, but still, the basics are there. The radio station makes a lot of their money from these "mini commercials".
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Re: Public broadcaster
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Much like the BBC.
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WHO should avoid it ?
From the perspective of noncommercial website owners that use CC-NC content, the court decision is especially bad. They have basically been told that they must avoid (or remove) CC-NC content, or risk being sued for infringement.
From the perspective of content creators that make their work available, the decision is not so bad -- on the one hand, they can be confident (in Germany anyway) that the license has some teeth to it if they want to pursue an infringement case; but on the other hand, they may find that the distribution of their work that they may have hoped for will now be reduced due to noncommercial site owners fear of using work with that license.
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Isn't NC usually redundant/unnecessary?
Shouldn't the Attribution and Share-Alike clauses deter the abuses that people are assuming the NC clause is for (i.e. if you have to give credit and can't monopolize the work, it's less convenient to "sell" copies purely for profit to begin with, and I can't think of many cases where someone would be stopped by the NC clause who wouldn't already be put off by the BY and SA clauses to begin with)?
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But wait, it comes from country and judiciary which "leagalized" gas chambers.
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Until the two parties disagree about what the contract means, and then it can become a judge's business. That's what happened here.
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This isn't a reason to get rid of NC.
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it's not specifically about "non commercial"
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