However, despite focussing on a business mo- del that is based on the kind of exclusivity of- fered by classic copyright law, these publishers can have an interest in their content being used in at least non-commercial areas of education and science, as this may boost sales via classical distribution. 19 Which is the license Wiki- pedia content is published under? The CC-BY-SA license. In order to increase the commons of free know- ledge and culture, Wikipedia requires every author to allow the general public a free reuse of their articles. This is achieved by a Creative Commons license that includes the Attribution (BY) and Share Alike (SA) modules, meaning that the license requires giving credit to the au- thor and distributing any edited versions under the same terms. Texts that were not created by the authors themselves, or texts that originated in a collaboration, may also only enter Wikipe- dia if they are put under a CC-BY-SA license or a compatible license. Up until 2009 Wikipedia had used the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) by the GNU initiative. The Free Software Foundation had originally developed this license for soft-
18 Can the NC module still have any advantages? Yes, but less often than you would think. For private individuals, there is usually no good reason for a restriction to non-commercial use only. In many cases there is very little realistic chance that a commercial user is willing to pay money for using the content. A CC license has the main goal to make the content as widely spread as possible. For achieving that the NC module is often a hindrance. In turn, anyone who has no intention of seeing the content widespread without strict control over it, can achieve this goal by excluding com- mercial uses. CC licenses with the NC module can make sense for publishers, whose business model is based on the traditional “all rights re- served”, who invest considerably in a publica- tion and hold their own distribution channels. Such publishers have no particular interest in allowing competitors to gain profit from their investment. The benefits of commercial use by third parties, namely a better and faster disse- mination, is less important for them because they maintain their own, often costly distribu- tion operations.
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