Toward a Common Discipleship Content License

Update: A number of things have changed since this article was first written. Some key changes include:

• Door43 is now live
• The license for www.dsmedia.org has been changed from the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike to the Attribution-Share Alike, the same license in use on Door43

Overview

As we are getting ready to go live with Door43, we are giving a lot of thought to the best license to use for the site. This site (www.dsmedia.org) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-Share Alike License, and we had originally thought we would use the same license for Door43. After a lot of research and gaining a better understanding of the potentially negative implications of using a "Noncommercial" condition, we are leaning toward removing it from the license for Door43 and using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. This license gives a number of significant advantages while still retaining the original intent of ensuring the continued free access to the discipleship tools we are creating.

In the rest of this post, we consider the reasons that the Noncommercial (NC) condition is less desirable for discipleship content and why we consider the use of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA) to be a better choice.

Licensing objectives

Before getting in to the discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the two licenses, it is important to clearly state what we want to accomplish with the material such that the license we choose allows us to accomplish the goals. These are the objectives for Door43, specifically with regard to its use, re-use, distribution and creation of derivative works (which necessarily include translations).

• Freedom – Provide legal freedom to edit, improve, translate, adapt, use and distribute Door43 content.
  
• Continuity – Ensure that these freedoms are never restricted, even derivative works.
  
• Reach – Maximize the availability and use of the content by removing unnecessary restrictions.
  
• Growth – Provide every opportunity for improving & expanding the content.
  
• Simplicity – Use the same license across all of Door43 so as to minimize licensing complexity.
  
• Consistency – Enable seamless use and re-use of content across all Door43 projects by using the same license for each project.

This last point is especially important when looking at the new and growing sphere of "open" discipleship materials around the world. Ideally, the same license for open discipleship content will be used by other creators of discipleship content such that there are no licensing conflicts for the use and re-use of discipleship materials in derivative works across organizational boundaries.

Why the Noncommercial condition should be avoided

For reference, the definition of the Noncommercial condition (see the legal code of the BY-NC-SA license) states the following:

"You may not exercise any of the rights [of the license] in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation." (emphasis added)

These are the concerns we have with the Noncommercial condition:

It is ambiguous – What does "primarily" mean when referring to "commercial advantage or pprivate monetary compensation"? The issue is not amount of profit but intent of the person which is notoriously difficult to prove, making the Noncommercial condition ambiguous and difficult to enforce. Consider these situations where we would want to encourage the use of Door43 content:

• What if someone includes Door43 content on their blog from which they make their living via advertisement revenues, is that a commercial use of the content?
• What if someone includes Door43 content in a "Free CD" of Bible study tools and resources with a paid subscription to a magazine, is that a commercial use of the content?
• What if someone creates a DVD of Door43 content and wants to sell the DVD to help recover their expenses? How much can they charge for the DVD without it becoming "primarily" a commercial advantage? Do they have to meticulously keep track of their costs and if they do, who enforces whether they have gone over the amount or not?

It only limits the "good guys" – Because of its ambiguity, license violators can find a way around the Noncommercial condition (or violate the license outright). The only people who will be affected by the Noncommercial condition are the "good guys" who are not a concern for abuse and exploitation of the content anyway.

It unintentionally "muzzles the ox" – Especially in developing communities and smaller language groups around the world, much of the translation and adaptation of discipleship content on Door43 will likely be done by self-motivated people who have no other source of income. Either they can provide food for their families or they can provide spiritual food for believers in their language group – they do not have the resources to do both. By removing the Noncommercial condition, they can at least have the chance to sell their work to other churches and believers to help provide for their own needs. This is a biblically-sanctioned model of ministry (see 1 Corinthians 9:7-12 and 1 Timothy 5:17-18) and we do not want to necessarily limit it by a license condition.

It is redundant – The main purpose of the Noncommercial condition is to prevent exploitation of another person's work by selling the content for a profit. While this sounds like a good thing to prevent, it can actual be redundant at best and detrimental at worst. On the other hand, the "Share Alike" condition (see http://creativecommons.org/about/license) requires that anyone who takes a work and creates a derivative work must "license their new creations under the identical terms." In other words, they are legally permitted to create a for-profit work using the original material but their work that they make is in turn required to be released under the same license. Practically this results in two things: it limits exploitation and it improves the quality of the original work (more on this in the next section).

It is complicated – When the Noncommercial condition is used in a community-built work (e.g. a wiki like Door43), it can quickly turn into a legal mess of epic proportions should there ever be a reason to want to waive the Noncommercial condition. (Note that the Noncommercial condition does not mean that commercial works are always forbidden, it means that commercial works are not pre-cleared and must be negotiated with the original copyright holder.) Consider this hypothetical example:

Let's say a study Bible is being built on-line and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License (CC-BY-NC-SA). The study Bible incorporates material from a church website that is also licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA. It also incorporates research and studies by 27 pastors and seminary students from 4 different countries that are also licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA.

The study Bible is now finished and it is a huge hit on-line where it is freely-available. Now a reputable publishing company wants to take the content, improve the readability, add some additional resources to fill in places where more information is needed, then publish it and sell thousands of copies.

But there is a problem: because of the Noncommercial condition in the original sources (i.e. the church website, the studies written by pastors and seminary students, etc.), the copyright holders of the on-line study Bible cannot grant commercial rights to the publishing company without first gaining permission from each and every contributor of material licensed under the Noncommercial condition.

If this was a small group of people, it might be possible. But what about when they are spread over the world, in various languages? What if even one of the people who released their work under a Noncommercial condition does not want to grant permission for the for-profit publishing of the study Bible? What if some of them have passed away and the heirs of their material cannot be contacted?

It limits the quality and growth – The Noncommercial condition prevents well-funded organizations from contributing their paid resources to improving Door43 since they cannot recover any of their expenses by selling their work. Consider these examples (taken from http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC and made available under the Creative Commons Attribution license):

The Linux operating system kernel is licensed under a Share Alike license. Many companies make use of customized versions of the kernel, for example, to include it in embedded devices (e.g. wireless routers). All improvements made by these companies are required to be releaed under the same license and so can be used by the main Linux kernel development team. If the kernel was under a Noncommercial license, the commercial use of Linux would be impossible and the improvements that could be made to it by for-profit corporations would not happen. Because Linux can be used in for-profit products and because of its Share Alike license, it gets the best of both worlds – it will always be free and corporations pay their own people to improve it.

Another example of commercial use is the German DVD version of Wikipedia. Produced by a company called Directmedia, it quickly became a bestseller in Amazon.de's software category. Yet, to make that DVD, Directmedia had to cooperate with Wikipedians who helped to prepare the data by making it searchable and sortable, and weeding out articles not ready for publication. Directmedia has, in return, donated a substantial percentage of the profits from the DVD to Wikipedia's mother organization. The monetary donation, while not required, does help to maintain goodwill with the community. It has also made a separate "donation" of 10,000 reproductions of public domain paintings to the Wikimedia Commons.

The advantages of the "Attribution-Share Alike" License

In the previous section we looked at why the "Noncommercial" condition on a license can do more harm than good. In this section we look specifically at the Attribution-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA) and its advantages for use in discipleship tools.

The Attribution-Share Alike license states:

You are free:

• to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

The advantages to the Attribution-Share Alike license are:

It provides freedom – The CC-BY-SA license provides legal freedom to edit, improve, translate, adapt, use and distribute Door43 content.

It preserves the continuity of these freedoms – Because of the "Share Alike" condition, any derivative work – even a for-profit one – must be released under the same license, ensuring that the content will always be available for free.

It maximizes the reach of the content – The CC-BY-SA license maximizes the reach of the content by:

• allowing people to support themselves by selling their work, making it so the content can be translated and made available in places that would otherwise require special funding to pay translators, fostering a sense of dependence which we want to avoid.
• the presence of the "Attribution" condition. This requires attributing the original work to Door43 and providing a link to http://door43.org. Because for-profit use of the content is permitted, the content can be used in more places, including the "markets" of the for-profit organizations creating the product. Door43 benefits from the increased exposure by having a larger pool of potential contributors to help build and extend the project.

It encourages growth of the content – The CC-BY-SA License encourages growth of the content in the following ways:

• By allowing for-profit use, it becomes possible for organizations to sell the resources for a profit such that they could offset the costs of paying their own employees to improve the work. Paying people to work full-time on developing the content is likely to result in more material being created in less time when compared to a volunteer-only team.
• It permits re-use of vast amounts of existing content contained in other projects that are licensed under the CC-BY-SA:
  • Wikipedia – Instead of writing everything from scratch in resources like the Open Bible Dictionary, a lot of content could be legally copied & pasted from Wikipedia articles (e.g. the article on Ephesus). A lot of the work would be limited to trimming down and editing the existing material to best serve the Door43 target audience and accomplish the specific Door43 objectives. As new content is developed in Door43, it could also be incorporated into relevant Wikipedia articles, increasing the exposure and reach of Door43.
  • Wikimedia Commons – A massive and growing amount of media content, some of which could significantly benefit Door43, could be directly included in Door43 since it is also CC-BY-SA. Door43 media could also be contributed to the Commons, increasing the exposure and use of Door43. But this would not be possible if Door43 uses a license with a Noncommercial condition.
  • Wiktionary, Wikibooks, etc. – By sharing a common license with much of the pre-existing "free & open" content, Door43 is in the best position possible to grow quickly and maximize its reach and influence.
• There may be significant benefit in the long-run (and especially in developing countries) to being license-compatible with the growing free culture movement that is tending toward using a CC-BY-SA license or even more permissive licenses (e.g. Attribution). From the Wikipedia article, "The free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of Free content by using the Internet and other forms of media."

Conclusion

Although the Noncommercial condition sounds like a good thing to prevent exploitation of free & open discipleship content, its ambiguity and unintended consequences may do more harm to the Door43 project than good. By contrast, the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license accomplishes the stated licensing objectives of the Door43 project without introducing unnecessary restrictions. For these reasons, we plan to use CC-BY-SA for Door43 discipleship content.

Photo made available by Edward Townend Photography under a Creative Commons Attribution license.