The NonCommercial licenses are popular -- four times as popular as non-NC on Flickr -- exactly because they're not generous. And that's including ShareAlike li

The NonCommercial licenses are popular -- four times as popular as non-NC on Flickr -- exactly because they're not generous. And that's including ShareAlike licenses which the CBC would presumably be excluded from using as well. And for all we know, out of that less than 20%, many may not turn out to be comfortable with commercial use anyway. On the other hand, you can guarantee that nearly everyone in a commercial licensing pool knows what the deal is. I also think of probably the most notable cultural "remixing" of the past few years, the Obama Hope design, famously discovered to be derived from an AP photographer's image. Would its designer, Shepherd Fairey, been any better off using a photograph with a CC-NC license? No, since in fact the first thing he did after creating it was to make hundreds of posters and sell them on the street. He would have been much better off using a licensing pool, like the CBC uses, or iStockphoto (where the Twitter whale debuted) rather than a CC-NC, or even another CC-licensed photo. Indeed, iStockphoto has arguably done more good for creators of cultural works than Creative Commons has.