Creative commons - license update

I have decided to change the license for the blog from CC-BY-SA to CC-BY-SA-NC. This post is about the motivation for the change.

Creative commons is a well known set of licenses that is usable for text, images and such, not for code. They have a list and a selection helper.

(image from uOttawa CC-BY 4.0)

There are 4 parts

• BY: This about attribution. If you use it, add where you have it from. I think I do mostly good stuff on this blog, and I find it fair to be credited.
• ND: Disallow derivative works. I don’t find that relevant here. Feel free to adapt what I wrote, or use my illustrations.
• SA: This is about the licence to use for derivative work. Again, from a fairness perspective, using a permissive license for any derived works seems fair.
• NC: Disallow commercial use. This is the extra condition I add now. I don’t like the idea of people misusing my stuff for commercial AI models, or other such bulk data usage. I don’t see this a limitation on e.g. academic work.

There is also the CC0 category for as close to public domain as possible. It is not everywhere that you can waiver your copyright.

Why add the NC clause?

It relates to AI systems and scraping. I see it as an extra legal barrier for bulk misuse. No, I don’t have an army of lawyers, but hopefully I can add to the legal problems of openAI et al. For more info see e.g. here and here.

And as a side note, other permissions may be granted by the copyright holder (ie. me), and, if you ask, you will proably get permission for whatever project you are doing. Again, it is the non-askers, that I want to target with this license.