It’s as if NC means “only for personal use, alone in a dark room.” It makes it very hard for those individuals or institutions who are legitimately following the rules to use NC content, whereas the authors have little recourse against those who ignore the rules.

For example, if I sell posters of Mickey Mouse without DIsney’s approval, I’m sure most reasonable people would say I’m breaking copyright/trademark/etc. But if the author of a song doesn’t want me playing it in a bar in the above example, that’s harder to show why it’s a form of commercialization of the song. Is that burden on the author?

Also, if there is a court precedent that says highly indirect commercialization like the aforementioned example is considered non-commercial, will all these survey respondents rise up in anger and leave the CC license for a more detailed NC license? I think not.

Personally I think that the big precedent to consider is personal copies. It’s technically fine to make a personal back-up copy of media such as DVDs and even to let friends borrow them. From what I remember you can also freely give away those copies, so long as you aren’t mass producing them or getting paid for the copies. In essence, personal use is fine, and you can deal with your property as your property. Money transactions are then limited to “official” copies.

A group of bright people, with similar tastes that live near each other, then build up a library of media where one person owns the media they bought and those who use it are recorded as using them. No money is exchanged, just people allowing each other to barrow in a logical and controlled manner.

Anyways … the other concerns are enforceability, sustainability and flexibility. The music industry tactics are merely scare tactics, not enforcing anything. A lot of those use, and especially those abusing, copyrights are not using sustainable business models. Which gets me to the flexibility of groups doing things like localization of illegal copies in regions where there is little to no support from the main company. If nothing else there should be classifications of derivative works.

Also, as a side note, there needs to be a good tuning of the copyright issuing processes. I’ve heard of attempts to copyright things that should never be possible to copyright. One was speech bubbles in a 3d MMO. Speech bubbles are in the public domain, and changing medium shouldn’t change that. It would be different if it was a stylized form of speech bubble, but that wasn’t the case.