NonCommercial and NoDerivatives

What “open” means here, and why these four miss it

PickALicense recommends open licences. That word has a published standard behind it, not a house style. The Open Definition sets it out in one sentence.

Two of its requirements are the ones NonCommercial and NoDerivatives fail. A licence has to allow use for any purpose, and it has to allow adaptations to be distributed.

Requiring credit is fine. Requiring that adaptations stay under the same licence is fine. Both are listed as allowable conditions, which is why CC BY and CC BY-SA are open licences and are among the results this site does return. Forbidding commercial use is not on that list, and neither is forbidding the sharing of adaptations.

NonCommercial is a defined term, not the everyday phrase

Most people read “NonCommercial” as “you can’t sell it”. The licence says something both narrower and wider than that, and it says it about the use, not about who is doing the using.

Creative Commons, which wrote the term, describes it as intent-based and says it deliberately does not enumerate cases. Its own guidance is explicit that a company is not excluded and a charity is not automatically covered.

That has a practical consequence people rarely anticipate: a reuser who is not sure whether their use is commercial cannot resolve it by looking at the licence, and neither can you. This site does not decide it either. Whether a particular downstream use counts as commercial is recorded in our research as a question we refuse to answer, because answering it would be a legal judgement about someone’s situation.

NoDerivatives does not stop people changing your work, and does not stop them selling it

NoDerivatives is the most misread of the four. It permits adaptations to be made. What it withholds is permission to share them.

“Share” is defined broadly — public display, performance, communication, dissemination and importation, not only distribution — so the withheld permission covers far more than publishing a file.

And if your reason for reaching for ND is that you don’t want your work used commercially, it does not do that. The word “commercial” does not appear anywhere in the CC BY-ND 4.0 legal code. We checked the canonical text: zero occurrences.

There is a trap here for anyone releasing audio. Under these licences, setting a recording against moving images always produces Adapted Material — so an ND grant does not permit sharing that video, unless an exception, a limitation, or separate permission independently allows it.

If you did not choose this: you are building on someone else’s restricted material

Some people arrive here wanting an open release and finding that part of what they are building on is NonCommercial or NoDerivatives. That is a different problem, and combining the material with your own work does not change its licence.

You cannot relicense material you do not hold the rights in. Where you rely on someone else’s licence, its conditions keep governing their material.

How far the restriction reaches into what you are making turns on whether your result is an adaptation of their material under that licence’s own definition, or a separate work sitting alongside it. That is a judgement about your specific work, and this site does not make it.

The honest options are narrow. Ask the rights holder for permission on different terms. Replace the restricted material with something you can license — your own work, or material under CC BY or CC BY-SA. Or accept that the combined result is not openly licensed, and label it accurately rather than implying otherwise.

What choosing one of these costs you

These are the consequences that show up months later, when someone wants to use the work and finds they cannot.

Wikimedia Commons will not host it. Its licensing policy requires that commercial use be allowed and that publication of derivative works be allowed, and it lists NonCommercial and NoDerivatives licences among those forbidden on the site. The same requirement rules the work out of Wikipedia articles.

It cannot go into a commercial remix. Creative Commons states the position plainly for anyone building on your work.

Under a ShareAlike variant, adapters are locked in too: anyone sharing an adaptation must apply the same licence, a later version of it, or one Creative Commons has approved as equivalent. Your restriction propagates to people you will never meet.

And for research data, the steward that wrote these licences recommends against them.

None of this makes the choice wrong for you. Some work should not be freely commercialised, and some creators have good reasons to withhold adaptations. It does make the choice expensive, and the price is paid by every later reuser rather than by you.

What none of these licences do

Two things are true of all four, and of the open Creative Commons licences as well.

They do not reach patents or trademarks. And they step aside entirely where a copyright exception applies: if someone’s use is fair use or fair dealing, the licence does not govern it, and its restrictions do not bind them.

What this page will not tell you

• Whether a particular use of a work is “commercial”. That depends on the facts of someone’s situation, and the licence’s own definition is where to start.
• Which of these four licences you should pick. This site asks one question about restrictions, which is not enough to tell a NonCommercial need from a NoDerivatives one, so it will not name one for you.
• Whether a licence you are considering is enforceable, or what it means in your jurisdiction. That is legal advice and this is not a lawyer.