Art

Various works produced in a project qualify more as a work of creative expression than as a tool or as data. For such works, the Creative Commons family of licenses was designed.

Creative Commons licenses fall into essentially all categories.

• CC-BY-ND is a proprietary-style license, prohibiting modification
• CC-0 is a public domain-equivalent, maximally permissive
• CC-BY-SA is a libre-style license, guaranteeing everyone the right to modify and redistribute

There is also a GPL-style license, designed for documentation; see the Wikipedia article GNU Free Documentation License for comparison and criticism against CC-BY-SA.

Creative Commons also has a license with a "non-commercial" clause: the work is not allowed to be used for "commercial" purposes. How to decide what activity qualifies as "commercial" is a question requiring lawyers and courts; for more details, see the Wikipedia article on Creative Commons NonCommercial license.

Exercise: Pick a creative work (or make up a fictional one); come up with three obviously non-commercial uses of this work.

Exercise: Now argue that all three of these uses are commercial.