The Scholar’s Space

Lessig’s got a post up this morning urging all of us to take CC’s 15-25 minute survey about what we think noncommercial means. As you may know, CC licenses come in several varieties, depending on how you choose to combine the basic features (attribution, commercial/noncommercial use, derivative uses and share-alike). And, as you may also know, there is much concern that the commercial/noncommercial distinction is not clear to many people, or put more practically speaking, what I think I mean by noncommercial may not be what you mean when you use my work. But even more problematically, I worry that *I myself* don’t really know what I mean by that distinction! If presented with a set of, say, 20 or 30 different uses, each subtly different, which am I comfortable with and which am I not comfortable with? Commercial/noncommercial may not get at the dividing line for me.

Even more disturbing, do I really want for all eternity to make this distinction, whatever it is? A gazillion years is a long time. What exactly do I care whether my photo of fall color in Austin in fall 2008 ends up in some way or another making someone some money some day? Really, do I care about that? Especially if there’s collateral uses I am disallowing by that distinction that I really don’t mind at all (some of the commercial uses that one can think of that one might not mind at all, but that one excludes categorically with the selection of a noncommercial license)?

Very confusing.

Well, CC is undertaking to try to sort it out: what do people think the distinction means? What do they want it to mean? Can it be clearer? The survey will help CC to do this. I urge you to go take it too, whether you’ve done a lot with CC licenses or not. It was a very good exercise for me to help me clarify my own thinking about what I want people to be able to do with my works that they find online now, or that they find in an archive of what was online in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, 100 years from now!