Non-commercial Guide (beta - 2008-10-01 - v. 0.02)

Determining what does and doesn't constitute commercial use is not always easy. Creative Commons are aware of the complications related to drawing a line between commercial and noncommercial use and are working to clarify the issue.

If you are in doubt about whether a particular use violates the noncommercial term of a CC license, we recommend that you use works that are explicitly licensed for commercial use (i.e. those available under one of the following licenses: CC BY, CC BY-SA or CC BY-ND), Alternatively, you may wish to approach the licensor directly to see if you need to discuss a commercial use agreement.

However, you may also want to try out this experimental non-commercial guide created by Creative Commons Norge. It is a menu driven guide designed to assist you in deciding whether a specific use of content available under a Creative Commons non-commercial license (i.e. CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA or CC BY-NC-ND), is allowed or not.

You will be asked a number of specific questions about the intended use of the content, and the system will then (we hope) tell you whether your use of NC-licensed content will be considered “non-commercial” according to the draft best practice guidelines about non-commercial use from Creative Commons.

If the system is unable to determine whether your use of the content will be “non-commercial”, you will be asked to provide feedback about your intended use and/or business model that we will use to improve the guide to provide better help in the future.

Start using the non-commercial guide

Please note: The non-commercial guide is experimental software currently being tested by Creative Commons Norge. This is an evolving project, so this guide may and will change. Please use it with discretion. A special apology to our Norwegian users that the current version is in English only. We are working on localization so that the guide may be easily adapted to any language, including Norwegian.

The non-commercial guide is adapted from a draft document titled «Proposed Best Practice Guidelines to Clarify the Meaning of “NonCommercial” in the Creative Commons Licenses» and some supplementary material in our: Arbeidsnotat: Definisjon av «ikkekommersiell» bruk.