Creative Commons Urged To Drop Non-Free Clauses In CC 4.0

TheSilentNumber writes "A member of Students for Free Culture has just published a thorough and detailed post calling for the retirement of the non-free clauses, NoDerivatives (ND) and NonCommercial (NC). They state, 'The NC and ND clauses not only depend on, but also feed misguided notions about their purpose and function.' and that 'Instead of wasting effort maintaining and explaining a wider set of conflicting licenses, Creative Commons as an organization should focus on providing better and more consistent support for the licenses that really make sense.'" Note that the opinions expressed are of the author alone and not necessarily the entire organization. More info on the process of revising the CC licenses.

Comments

What's a derivative work?

[Compaqt]

One of the worrying things about using CC material is: What is a derivative work?

This matters for the viral/copyleft CC-SA (CC Share and Share Alike) license.

For example, if you have a web page, and you either excerpt or publish a full Wikipedia article, along with your other content, have you just given permission to people to use your content from that webpage?

Is the virality of the CC-SA limited just to the part which you excerpt, or the whole webpage, or your whole website?

I.e., you include some CC-SA material, and now your entire website is considered a "work", and it's a derivative. What if you also have GPL and GFDL stuff in the mix? Which license wins?

If you include CC-SA stuff on a CD, does the entire CD become CC-SA?