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Opening Pandora's Box: Defining Noncommerical Use in Creative Commons Licenses
Last modified: 2011-03-25
Abstract
Creative Commons (CC) licenses—alternative copyright licenses that aim to “lower the legal barriers to creativity through an innovative coupling of law and technology” —were first released to the public in December 2002 and have been one of the most well-known and successful initiatives of the free culture movement. One of the challenges CC has been facing, however, is defining the noncommercial use in its licenses. Consequently, CC conducted a large-scale study on U.S. Internet users’ understanding of the meaning of the noncommercial use and released its own report as well as the raw data to the public in September 2009. The CC study included in-depth interviews and two waves of in-person and online focus groups and online questionnaires.
The proposed study will further analyze the raw data of the CC study and take a critical look at the concept of the noncommercial use. In doing so, the proposed study will employ a theoretical framework that contrasts two competing views on copyright protection. The first view is a private property vision that emphasizes the private interests of authors in controlling the use of copyrighted works as their property. The latter is a public policy that underscores the importance of public interests in accessing and using copyrighted work.
Conceptualizing the noncommercial use is crucial for the future of CC licenses and other free culture movements not only because the importance of ensuring creators’ economic gains thrives as a key point in copyright law but also because the proper scope of protecting economic interests is on which the private property vision and public policy vision fundamentally differ. Moreover, the proposed study will examine the dynamics between the noncommercial use and other CC license elements such as attribution and no derivative work. This examination will be illuminating on the discourse of online copyright protection on a global scale, for the U.S. copyright law—unlike the European tradition influenced by the natural law theory and personalist doctrines—takes a utilitarian approach under which ensuring creators’ economic interests is considered necessary to stimulate creation and thereby enhance the general well-being of societies.
The proposed study will further analyze the raw data of the CC study and take a critical look at the concept of the noncommercial use. In doing so, the proposed study will employ a theoretical framework that contrasts two competing views on copyright protection. The first view is a private property vision that emphasizes the private interests of authors in controlling the use of copyrighted works as their property. The latter is a public policy that underscores the importance of public interests in accessing and using copyrighted work.
Conceptualizing the noncommercial use is crucial for the future of CC licenses and other free culture movements not only because the importance of ensuring creators’ economic gains thrives as a key point in copyright law but also because the proper scope of protecting economic interests is on which the private property vision and public policy vision fundamentally differ. Moreover, the proposed study will examine the dynamics between the noncommercial use and other CC license elements such as attribution and no derivative work. This examination will be illuminating on the discourse of online copyright protection on a global scale, for the U.S. copyright law—unlike the European tradition influenced by the natural law theory and personalist doctrines—takes a utilitarian approach under which ensuring creators’ economic interests is considered necessary to stimulate creation and thereby enhance the general well-being of societies.