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I recently wrote an email to a colleague suggesting that they publish a piece of work under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license instead of the Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license. I often find myself making this case, so I've generalised that email into this post so I can refer back to it later.

I received a certificate from Creative Commons on copyright and open licensing, and respectfully suggest that the material be published with the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) license instead of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

As authors and creators, the primary audience of our work are likely fellow academics or professional staff like librarians. And we might not always want – for example – big companies like academic publishers profiting off of our work without giving anything back.

However, the NonCommercial clause is very ambiguous about exactly what counts as “commercial” uses of a work, and interpretations vary greatly by jurisdiction. For example, there could be a teacher or lecturer who wants to incorporate a piece of CC BY-NC licensed work in their education materials, but hesitates to do so because they work in a private school that technically makes a “profit”. It's unclear if the fact that their school makes money would run afoul of the NonCommercial clause. In another example, a non-profit organisation might seek to incorporate CC BY-NC licensed work into their fundraising materials. Again, they might hesitate to do so because while they are a non-profit group, the specific use involves “making money”. In other words, the CC BY-NC license often creates unintended chilling effects on otherwise valuable and desirable uses of a work.

In contrast, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) license takes a “pay it forward” approach, where downstream uses are allowed as long as users continue to share the work or any of its derivatives under the same CC BY-SA license. This means the CC BY-SA licensed work and all derivatives will be kept open.

This works around the NC clause's chilling effects while providing the side benefit of deterring undesirable uses by big companies, because those entities typically seek to close and lock things down instead of opening them. I'd go as far as to say that if someone comes up with a commercial use of CC BY-SA licensed works, this is something we should encourage anyway!

Therefore, unless there is a very specific and well-defined commercial use that we are certain can be, and must be, deterred by the CC BY-NC license, we should instead use the CC BY-SA license. The latter fosters a culture of not only openly sharing our creative works, but also encourages good citizenship where everyone pays it forward.

Here is a grab bag of relevant further readings:

https://zookeys.pensoft.net/article/3036/list/1/

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_NonCommercial_license

https://creativecommons.org/faq/#does-my-use-violate-the-noncommercial-clause-of-the-licenses

#openresearch #opensource #licensing

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Unless otherwise stated, all original content in this post is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license