Free Knowledge, Thanks to Creative Commons Licenses

The public licenses de- veloped by Creative Commons (CC) are tools which make creative works available for free use under certain conditions. As

rights holders have different needs and motives, CC offers six different license variants. Some of the most popular license variants include the condition that the licensed works must not be used commercially. This has far-reaching and often unintended consequences for the dissemination of the respective works and sometimes even entirely thwarts what the licensor wants to achieve by choosing a CC license. This brochure wants to offer information on consequences, risks and side-effects of the restrictive CC license variants that don‘t allow commer- cial use.

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