I'm doing some research on Creative Commons licenses, and I need help
interpreting CC-BY-NC. After reading the legal code for this license, it
seems that NC might can be negated in a 2nd generation derivative work
("Adaptation" under the terms of the license) by releasing the 1st
generation work as a plain CC-BY license. Or is the NC clause
functioning as a weak form of copyleft?
In the first instance, an author
(1) creates an Adaptation. Under the terms of the license, she is
obligated to follow the restrictions in the license. But she does not
have to license the resulting work under CC-BY-NC, but rather chooses
CC-BY.
(2) The same author, or another author, creates an adaptation of the
adaptation listed in (1). Because the 2nd generation derivative work is
no longer subject to an NC clause, the author is no longer obligated to
observe the restrictions of the CC-BY-NC license in the original work.
****
Or, is something different happening here which preserves the
restriction through derivative versions? Would the NC clause require
that an adaptation itself be licensed under a CC license (or similar)
with an NC clause because of the "directed toward commercial advantage"
clause in 4A in the license, such as either CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-ND-NC, or
CC-BY-SA-NC? Here is the link to the legal code:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode
Thanks for any assistance,
Charlie Lowe
Assistant Professor of Writing
Grand Valley State University