Creative Commons and Business
To make a substantial profit with your work, a company will have to provide added value beyond what is available for free. An -NC license stops any such attempt to add value in its tracks. But there is an alternative. The Creative Commons “Share-Alike” licenses require any work derived from your own to be made available as free content, as a whole. (The licenses without a share-alike clause only guarantee that the part of the work created by you remains free.) Any company trying to exploit your work will have to make their “added value” available for free to everyone. Seen like this, the “risk” of exploitation turns into a potentially powerful benefit.
This principle works very well in many areas of free content and free software development. Most notably, the Linux operating system kernel is licensed under a share-alike (or copyleft) license. Many companies make use of customized versions of the kernel, for example, to include it in embedded devices. All improvements made by these companies can be used by the main Linux kernel development team. If the kernel was under an -NC license, the commercial use of Linux would be impossible.
Another interesting tale of commercial use is the German DVD version of Wikipedia. Produced by a company called Directmedia, it has quickly become a bestseller in Amazon.de’s software category. Yet, to make that DVD, Directmedia had to cooperate with Wikipedians — who helped to prepare the data by making it searchable and sortable, and to weed out articles not ready for publication. Directmedia has, in return, donated a substantial percentage of the profits from the DVD to Wikipedia’s mother organization. It has also made a separate “donation” of 10,000 reproductions of public domain paintings to the Wikimedia Commons.
The Wikipedia DVD was a working business model because it provided added value: an offline reader software which did not previously exist, combined with a well-organized effort to whip the content into shape. It also showed that beyond the copyleft principles, any highly successful cooperation with commercial entities around free content is likely to depend on mutual goodwill. Another illustration of the same principle is Answers.com, a commercial Wikipedia mirror, whose parent company pays for one of Wikimedia’s developers, and has also been one of the sponsors of Wikimedia’s 2005 conference, Wikimania. None of this is required by the license.
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3 Responses to “Creative Commons and Business”
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The first paragraph is based on a misinterpretation of the Share-alike clauses. The BY-SA indeed states that any derivative works must be licensed under a similar license but the paragraph ends with “The above applies to the Derivative Work as incorporated in a Collective Work, but this does not require the Collective Work apart from the Derivative Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this License.”
The author clearly is confused when he states that “any work work derived from your own [must] be made available as free content, as a whole”. The word “as a whole” indicates that he is in fact speaking about Collective Works, not Derivative Works. The above quoted clause ensures that Collective Works are not affected by the “viral” effects of the Share-alike element.
Otherwise, I do agree that the NC-element isn’t always a sane choice from a business perspective.
That’s fine for them, but if I myself want to profit from my work, I tend to distribute with a -NC license. Why? Because if someone wants to profit from my work, they _can_, but with my permission. It depends what your business model really is. When I write fiction, I -NC it. For my site, http://geekmatters.com, I tend to just use an -SA license, hoping to draw more traffic and make money from ads.
“…An -NC license stops any such attempt to add value in its tracks. ..”
Not sure in this statement. I believe that this kind of licence give a model for adding the value through the value chain and making the income for the the content owner, and still leaving the space for content owner to decide about comerical conditions. Its perfect fit for the new economy where intangilble values having a major role. But also technology gave us a opportunity to very precisely evaluate value add and income generated by using my work.
really looking forward to disccus the topic more in depth.
Kind regards
Sergej
sergej@tockica.com