There are other licenses that we could use, rather than a Creative Commons license. Or we could come up with our own proprietary license, as other entities have done: FWK License 1.0. This could be custom designed to fit our specific purposes, and encompass the rights and/or restrictions of other licenses out there. Here are a few we could consider:
Commercial Rights Reserved (CRR)
Mentioned earlier in the series, but not endorsed by Creative Commons yet. It functions like CC-BY-NC-SA. We could pioneer the use of it, before they are ready. See more at: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/NonCommercial
Copyleft
We could use Copyleft as our license, which is similar to CC-BY-NC-SA. It does not require that the material is open access.
Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work. In other words, copyleft is a general method for making a program (or other work) free (libre), and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. This free does not necessarily mean free of cost (gratis), but free as in freely available to be modified.
Free Culture License
We could call our specifically NOT a “Free Culture License,” or “Not Approved for Free Cultural Works.” See the License Chooser: http://creativecommons.org/choose/
In order for something to be considered Free Culture, it can’t have any usage restrictions:
Restrictions which are not permissible
Apart from these allowed restrictions, the license must not include clauses that limit essential freedoms. Especially, it must not specify any usage restrictions.
Non Derivatives
The freedom to make changes and to distribute derivatives — one of the core freedom at the heart of the definition — is clearly not available to use the users of works under licenses which block or restrict the creation of derivative works. As a result, no license that bars the creation of derivative works without permission can be considered a Free Culture license.
Non Commercial
Licenses which only allow non-commercial use are not considered Free Culture licenses. This is because in practice there are many ways that Cultural works can be used and reused which would be considered commercial. Another problem is that there is no generally agreed definition of where the border line is between Commercial and Non Commercial uses with very many cases falling in the undefined area in between. In practice Share Alike or Copyleft clauses provide a restriction on commercial profits since any reuse making excessive profits will soon stimulate a bunch of copycats which will bring prices down while encouraging even wider distribution of the works – which is the objective of the free culture licenses.
NonFree Documentation Licenses
- Open Publication License (OPL)
- Open Content License (OCL)
Both licenses function similarly to CC-BY-NC-SA. See more at: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NonFreeDocumentationLicenses
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