That Blurry Line Between Commercial & Non-Commercial Use Still Troubling For Creative Commons

from the is-this-commercial-use? dept

First off, I should say that I respect what the folks over at Creative Commons are doing, and think they really do have the best interests of content creators and the public at heart in their plans -- but I've always been a bit uneasy with the whole setup of Creative Commons -- some of which I expressed last year in discussing the difficulty in distinguishing commercial from non-commercial use, as is necessary in many CC licenses. As I wrote at the time:

But it's this blurring of "personal" and "work" lives that again has me pondering if there really is a meaningful distinction between "commercial use" and "non-commercial use." Some of this debate first came about years ago, when some web publishers claimed that their RSS feeds were "for non-commercial use only," but what does that mean? If I read your site as part of my job, have I violated that rule? If I learn information from your feed that allows me to make money, have I violated that rule? More recently, there have been proposals to separate copyright violations, such that "non-commercial use" is allowed. But, again, you quickly run into very questionable scenarios. If my personal blog has Google AdSense on it, is it commercial use? If I end up getting a job because of my "personal use" of your content, does it suddenly morph into "commercial use"? The questions get more and more confusing, and the mess would make less and less sense.

It seems that Danny Sullivan has come across the same issue, and is taking both Flickr and Creative Commons to task for the ambiguity in their licenses which is so confusing that even those who are using CC licenses don't seem to totally agree with what their own licenses say. He details a variety of stories, where it's simply not clear at all what is really allowed under the CC license being used. If a commercial blog uses and attributes a photo that has a "non-commercial use" only license, is that infringing? Or is that "non-commercial use" only limited to not selling the image. But some might argue that you were "selling ads off of the image." It all gets quite blurry fast.

To their credit, the folks at Creative Commons have been working hard on trying to deal with the ambiguity (and part of the reason for the original post I linked to at the beginning of this story was a survey they were taking on this very subject). But it's quite clear that there's still an awful lot of ambiguity that isn't really helped by the phrase "non-commercial use."

Filed Under: commercial use, copyright, creative commons, non-commercial use

ACTA Proposal Would Criminalize Substantial Non-Commercial Infringement

from the consumers-have-no-seat-at-the-table dept

With various governments still insisting that ACTA negotiations must be done in near total secrecy, various folks are working hard to at least shine some sunlight on the details. Michael Geist discusses what he's been able to piece through, and it's not pretty. The only good news is that everything is still in the early stages, and there's some disagreement among the participating trade reps concerning how certain things should work. However, that's about the only good news. The bad news is that many of the provisions are clearly being submitted with significant "input" from industries who stand to benefit from greater IP protectionism -- and no effort has been made to see what impact the resulting output would have on everyone else.

Even more troubling are the specific details supplied by KEI, who includes some draft text, including a proposal pushed by the US and Japan to use ACTA to make certain forms of personal, non-commercial infringement a criminal offense as a "deterrent." Yes, this would include potential jailtime, even if the infringer had no intent to profit. Notice that this is happening in backrooms among trade representatives, rather than in public among elected officials -- especially as various countries have been increasingly open to the idea of exempting personal, non-commercial infringement from being subject to legal punishment. This "treaty" would force countries to put a halt to that, and then we'd hear all sorts of big-time IP defenders insist that we absolutely had to make these changes to the law to "live up to international treaties" which they helped write.

KEI also points out another downside to all of this being negotiated in secret. It appears that many of the trade representatives are ignorant of certain laws already in place in their own countries, as well as other legislation that is currently under consideration. For example, KEI notes the current debates over copyright laws concerning "orphaned works" which is a big issue in Congressional copyright discussions. Some of what's being pushed in ACTA would mess up those discussions -- but who cares, apparently, trade representatives, pushed on by industry representatives, seem to have no problem determining for themselves what copyright law should be all about.

Filed Under: acta, copyright, criminal, non-commercial use, secrecy, sunlight, trade agreements