It’s been a long time since we last wrote about the ongoing discussion of the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives licenses. Recall that last year CC heard suggestions that it should stop offering NC and ND licenses in future versions of our license suite because these licenses do not create a true commons of open content that everyone is free to use, redistribute, remix, and repurpose.

The CC community agreed to not make such a radical change as to stop offering the NC or ND licenses in the soon-to-be-released 4.0 licenses, or to spin off those licenses to another host organization. However, as promised, we have been working on several projects to help explain and clarify these issues to license users.

• We’ve improved information about which CC licenses align with definitions of “Free licenses.”
• We’ve reinstated a color-coded license spectrum graphic and provided descriptive examples of adopters of both Free and non-free licenses.
• We gathered feedback about changing the name of “NonCommercial” to “Commercial Rights Reserved” and decided that the name will stay at “NonCommercial.”