Due to the difficult line determining what is commercial and non-commercial use of copyrighted materials, Creative Commons has recently completed a study regarding this issue — with surveys of both content creators and users (PDF full report here). This study has lots of interesting information for the fan-creative-remix community.
The study’s findings include that
Many group participants noted that there are promotional and thus potentially economic or commercial advantages to creators in connection with releasing content freely for noncommercial use. For these creators, “credit” for permitting noncommercial use is very important, and the question of attribution is something that gets factored into their consideration of when a use is acceptable. … As a practical matter, many seem to consider noncommercial use as having minimal or indirect commercial impact, rather than absolutely no commercial impact.
What about users?
As do creators, users often approach the question of noncommercial use on a case-by-case basis. Paralleling many creators’ approach to deciding when to allow or license a noncommercial use, many users also explained they use content guided by their own principles or personal rules of thumb, or in accord with practices followed by other users, which they hope creators are more likely to accept, on a “safety in numbers” theory. Verbatim examples of how some users articulate their understanding of when a use is noncommercial include:
· “if it’s for education or personal use”
· “if it does not compete – noncommercial is really non-compete”
· “if the creator is getting promotional value”
Jessica Litman in Lawful Personal Use suggests that personal uses of copyright works arguably *is* outside of copyright protection.
So how does the study respond? It alows for leaning towards that direction:
users are much more likely than creators to rate personal or private uses as noncommercial, and there is strong consensus among users on this point. Thus this particular use scenario, at least as rated by users, stands out from all the others as being the most ‘definitively’ noncommercial …. Creators also agree that personal or private uses are the least commercial of all scenarios measured, but it is striking to have this one instance in which users believe the use is even less commercial than creators.
