Creative Commons: What’s Non-Commercial Anyway?
A case between GateHouse Media and the New York Times Company is exposing a loophole in Creative Commons licensing.
GateHouse, a publisher of local news, has distributed content from their 500 publications under a Creative Commons license since 2006. This means that the content is freely available to other publishers as long as they provide proper attribution to the work, use the work for “non-commercial purposes” and do not alter the original work.
Enter the Times-owned Boston Globe which has been using Gatehouse content to populate hyper-local news micro-sites at Boston.com.
As the Nieman Journalism Lab notes:
GateHouse argues that the Globe’s use of GateHouse text violates the terms of that CC license, because Boston.com is a commercial website.
But is it? What counts as “commercial”? The Globe doesn’t charge for access to its website. It does run advertising, but so do plenty of small blogs that few people would consider “commercial.” It’s a sticky issue that Creative Commons has not yet clarified for its users
The full Nieman rundown can be found here and includes a video interview with David Ardia, Director, Citizen Media Law Project.
Michael Cervieri is a ScribeLabs co-founder and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs where he teaches a course called Tubes, Code and Content. On Twitter, he's @bmunch.
The discussion of commercial vs. non-commercial is becoming ever more difficult. Innocentive — a Game Changer award-winner from our Naked Media media partners “We Media” (see http://www.wemedia.com) is venture funded and helps companies get crowd-sourced solutions to their scientifically oriented challenges (injecting flouride into toohpaste, finding a new chemical compound, etc.) but is also helping find cures to AIDS and ALS for charitable foundations.
SocialVibe, another award-winner that’s also venture-funded and for-profit, helps users place ads on social networks like Facebook, and elect a charity to which the ad money goes.
We could be cut and dry: is the entity created and incorporated, is its legal tax status “not-for-profit.” In that case, both fail the sniff test Michael alludes to above. But, isn’t that, then, shooting some not-for-profits in the foot, if we force the narrow interpretation on them?