An invitation from Creative Commons to take part in an online focus group on the NonCommercial element of CC licences. Please consider participating especially if you are an African creator.
As previously announced,Creative Commons is researching “noncommercial use”. Last year we
conducted a number of focus groups and fielded a survey (thank you
everyone who responded!) designed to collect information about how
creators understand the distinction between commercial and
noncommercial uses of their content. Now we want to talk to people
about their experience as users of content they find online,
regardless of whether the content is licensed under a CC license, with
or without the NC term, or even licensed at all.We hope to connect with individuals and organizations from a variety
of communities and industries, using a variety of content, in many
different media. We seek insight and experience, not any endorsement
of Creative Commons, its licenses, or any particular perspective.We are currently scheduling a limited number of online bulletin board
type focus groups, which will take place over the course of three
days, from Wednesday, February 18 through Friday, February 20. The
time commitment for participants is approximately two hours. The
groups will be conducted in English.If you are interested in participating, please fill out a questionnaire, which will explain what we plan to do with the data we collect, and will also ask you for
some basic background information.There are a limited number of spaces in each focus group. Please
understand that we may not be able to respond individually to everyone
who fills out the questionnaire, but if you are selected to
participate, we will contact you as soon as possible to confirm your
participation.Thank you for your interest and help with this study.
_____________________________________________
To stimulate and possibly focus (or divert) discussion:
Commercial use would be any use involving exchange of money. For learning resources being shared in the “developing” world, most need to be adapted (translated, re-contextualised) and disseminated (on CD, printed, etc.) for people without bandwidth (or electricity, etc.). It would be good not to impose a non-commercial restriction so that (local) people could offer professional services to produce, adapt, localise, disseminate, etc. This will accelerate dissemination and (meaningful) access while promoting innovation and collaborative production of appropriate material.
What are the special situations which require an NC restriction that would actually benefit society? What types of resources? (entertainment, …?)
If we decide in general not to apply the “NC” restriction, (e.g. in the wide domain of education and knowledge sharing), this potentially intractable question/ problem/ discussion becomes irrelevant.
Would it not be more productive to discuss and put energy into more constructive things such as effecting collaborative production of libre knowledge resources? ().
Kim, you say commercial use is any use involving money.
Does that include cost recovery? Does that include education which people have paid for?
Isn’t that just too vague?
I agree that in general educational resources should be under true copyleft licences such as Attribution Share-Alike.
But commercial publishers have allowed books under NC by Docterow, Lessig and Benkler which just wouldn’t be available otherwise.