I don't entirely get the OP, if it is CC-BY then I think you could add ads to your trailer and collect money on his music. Perhaps he chose the wrong license..

If it is CC-BY-NC then he should be able to prevent you from adding ads in combination with his music (though youtube can't settle whether the larger point of the video is commercial), but he doesn't have any rights to add ads nor should youtube act as a music agent to broker deals with video producers as he asserts at the end.

> If it is CC-BY-NC then he should be able to prevent you from adding ads in combination with his music

I would recommend anybody not to license in a CC license that includes "NC" as long it is not clearly defined what you mean by "commercial".

- Is using the music in a private YouTube video commercial (probably not)?

- Is using the music in a private YouTube video that, say, some 3D-Designer rendered for a classroom project commercial?

- Is using the music in a YouTube video that some 3D-Designer rendered for a classroom project but with the potential of showing his skills to potential employers commercial?

- Is using the music in a YouTube video that some 3D-Designer rendered for some funny private side project with the potential of showing his skills to potential employers commercial?

- Is using the music in a YouTube video that some 3D-Designer released for free to show his skills to potential employers commercial?

- Is enabling ads on such YouTube videos commercial? What if you enable ads because you had costs?

- Is using the music in an advertising video that is distributed only freely commercial (rather yes)?

- Is using the music in a commercial film commercial (clearly yes)?

If you say something is commercial if you get paid for it, what other types of compensation makes it commercial/non-commercial: YouTube clicks, Facebook likes, Bitcoins (when they had no value), attention for other (advertized) videos in your YouTube channel, awareness among potential employers?

While it is a grey area, its not that untested. The tax office is a good proxy to define commercial vs non-commercial, and there should be plenty of precedence for different cases. In cases where the tax office don't consider something as commercial/for-profit/done under compensation and do not tax them as such, the copyright owner has a much weaker case to argue commercial activity.

In the 3D-Designer examples above, could you define what taxes everyone involved is paying? I rather sure that no person has every paid taxes for the production of their own CV, unless they create a sole proprietorship, in which case its very likely that they are doing something commercial.

> what other types of compensation makes it commercial/non-commercial

The Swedish tax office define income as work done under compensation. Gifts, in contrast, is valuables given with no expectation of compensation. Income is taxed, gifts are not. In your list, YouTube clicks, Facebook likes, attention and awareness is not taxed as income. Bitcoins were not taxes either when they had no value, but are now when given as form of compensation.

> While it is a grey area, its not that untested. The tax office is a good proxy to define commercial vs non-commercial, and there should be plenty of precedence for different cases. In cases where the tax office don't consider something as commercial/for-profit/done under compensation and do not tax them as such, the copyright owner has a much weaker case to argue commercial activity.

At least for German websites you have to add an imprint (Impressumspflicht - there is no proper English translation of this that I know of since this is a concept that to my knowledge only exists in Germany). What content this has to contain depends on whether the website is to considered as commercial or not. What remains to be said is obvious: There are court decisions that say that there are completely different criteria for a website to be commercial (in the sense of the content of the imprint) than the criteria tax authorities apply.

I've been wrestling with these issues this morning, because I'm launching a podcast soon that might, sometime down the line, be big enough where ads to defray the cost of operating it makes sense. And whether that makes pre-advertising content commercial is an open question. So while I've browsed Free Music Archive, to be safe, I'm omitting anything NC from my searches.

These are all reasons not to republish -NC- material, they are no more convincing reasons not to use it to license as the arguments against GPL3.

Maybe you have less uptake from people in the grey areas and less spread through for profit use. Looking at OSS today, maybe that is what you want.

Disagree. There are philosophical and practical reasons to argue against copyleft licenses in favor of more permissive licenses. [ADDED: or vice versa.] But there's not a lot of debate about what copyleft means (outside of some corner cases relating to linking and interfaces).

The issue with NC isn't so much around the fact that it prohibits commercial use--though in the views of some that makes it a non-free license and therefore something to avoid for that reason alone--but that defining what constitutes commercial use in the general case is essentially impossible and very much in the eyes of the beholder.

GPL2's single work issue may be a better example of ambiguosness, but dual licensing w/GPL3 is complex enough to collect from commercial licensees. Enterprises often buy the paid license because it is too hard for them to evaluate whether they will manage compliance over time.

Such a method seems quite typical to protect ones work while sharing it with end users and seems to be what the OP expected from using CC.

I don't like the state of NC, but the point of copyleft is harvesting the irony that licensors get to state the terms and aren't particularly penalized for much of anything they do wrong (their unenforceable clauses are simply ignored). So why not take NC if you want CC with a commercial chilling effect? You don't have to sue anyone, yet that chill is still there. A resolution in one US court wont even change that chill much.

> they are no more convincing reasons not to use it to license as the arguments against GPL3.

The GPLv3 defines rather exactly what is allowed and what is not. That's what a license is for: defining exactly what is allowed and what isn't (which does not contradict that there are purposes for which the GPLv3 is suitable and ones for which it is not). NC for Non-Commercial in Creative Commons on the other hand is some wishy-washy term that does not clearly define where the boundary between commercial and non-commercial is.