I will declare thy righteousness, and thy works; for they shall not profit thee. [Isiah 57:12]

I have seen the light, and I no longer use a Creative Commons license which prohibits commercial use. I now use the simpler, newer Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK license. Yay!

My primary reason for using -NC in the first place was to guard against the possibility of Bad Guys ripping off content and making it un-Free. I now realise that the share-alike clause already protects against such Bad Guys, except the ones who don’t care about licenses, who won’t be deterred by any license clause.

My new primary reason for abandoning -NC is that I don’t believe there is any such thing as non-commercial use. Sure, there are legal definitions of non-profit and such, but they suffer from the idea that money is the same thing as value, or wealth. If a random blogger wants to use one of my photos on their AdSense-enabled blog, they might make money, but even if they don’t run ads, they still create wealth. Why? Because they wouldn’t have used the picture unless they perceived some value in doing so! It could make their blog prettier, attract more viewers, generate peer cred, or even just make them happy. Money is one type of wealth among many, and I like the idea that my photo could create wealth for someone. Wealth is a good thing, in whatever form it takes, including money.

It seems picky and unjustifiably miserly to say that someone can use my photo to create all kinds of wealth except money, especially since money is just an intermediate form of the other kinds of wealth.

Share and enjoy!