Creative Commons 4 Educators

Hi all

Sorry this has taken a while - let me know if anyone thinks they need an extension for the assignment this week as a result.

But here are the group explanations I promised.

Noncommercial
As most of you picked up, there isn't one clear definition of noncommercial. This isn't a problem just for CC - it's increasingly becoming an issue for all copyright licences, as people choose to use noncommercial as a limitation even in non-Cc licences (in fact, I just wrote an essay about this).

This won't usually be a problem - for most uses, it will be clear whether they are commercial or not. For example, publishing material in a tabloid magazine, or using it in a coke ad, or playing it in a nightclub, will basically always be commercial. However, there are uses that are more grey - like a charity using the material for fundraising purposes.

It is impossible to provide an absolute definition of Nc that will cover all circumstances, and you can never be absolutely sure what a court will say until you actually get to a case. This is a very common situation in copyright law - the same can be said for determining what is fair use, or what is 'reasonable' (a term used in many copyright rules).

So the approach we take at CC is to recommend that people make their own decision about whether they think their use is commercial. If you aren't confident about your use, we recommend that you find replacement material that doesn't have the NC restriction, or that you contact the original creator for extra permission.

But as a rule of thumb, it's usually safe to assume that educational uses are noncommercial, and that anything that involves advertising is not.

As some of you pointed out, here's some good discussion of this, and an entire study devoted to it, at https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17127.

Derivative v collection
In the CC system, when you combine more than one work together you can end up with either a derivative work or a collection. A collection is when you simply place several works next to each other, like a slideshow or an anthology. A derivative is when you combine several works together, adapting and remixing them to make one new work - like creating a video or song.

This is a very technical part of the licences, and not one that many people ever have to worry about. However, it can be important, because the CC licences treat derivatives and collections differently.

For instance, you can include a work under a no derivatives licence in a collection, but you can't put it in a derivative work.

And the sharealike clause only affects derivative works, not collections. So you can include, for example, BY-NC-SA material in a collection without having to license the whole collection under BY-NC-SA. You can simply note the licences of each work in the collection separately (including non-CC licences and all rights reserved). However, if you use BY-NC-SA material in a derivative you have to license the entire derivative work under that licence - so all the other material you use in that derivative work must be able to be legally relicensed under BY-NC-SA. This is licence compatibility, which I discuss more below.

In case study 2, the video was a derivative work - in fact, the legal code of the CC licences specifically states that making a video is always a derivative work (this is included for clarity, rather than because it changes the rule - the theory is that a video always involves changing the work, even if it's only by putting a soundtrack behind it). However, the blog could be either a derivative work or a collection, depending how it is used and set up. As external works are usually just copied wholesale onto a blog, it will often be a collection. However, the site licensing must reflect this, eg by stating that "unless otherwise note, all material on this site is under XXX licence."

Sharealike and licence compatibility
As mentioned above, when you are use sharealike material in a derivative work you are required to license that work under the same sharealike licence. This means you must make sure that all the other material in the work can be legally relicensed under that particular licence, or it cannot be used in the work with the sharealike material. We call this licence compatibility.

For example, you cannot use BY-SA and BY-NC material in the same derivative work, as you would be required to license the final work under BY-SA, which allows commercial use. This would breach the NC clause of the BY-NC work. However, you can combine BY-NC-SA and BY-NC materials, because you can honor all the elements of both the licences by licensing the final work under BY-NC-SA.

Importantly, this means that the two SA licences - BY-SA and BY-NC-SA - are always incompatible. This is because they both state that you must license any derivative works under exactly the same licence and, importantly, ONLY that licence. This means that you cannot honor both licences - you will always have to pick only one licence for the final work - you can't use both.

People often get this confused - they think that SA only means you have to license the derivative under any licence with the SA element, and so you can choose either BY-NC-SA or BY-SA. But the point of SA is to enable people to control downstream uses of their works - including whether commercial uses are allowed.

As many of you picked up, there's a licensing chart at that sets out which works are compatible eith each other on the main Cc website at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#If_I_use_a_Creative_Commons-licensed.... It isn't always the easiest thing to understand, but hopefully with this knowledge behind you it will make sense.

Let me know if you have any more questions.