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# NC
*See also [ND](nd.md).*
In the context of [licenses](license.md) the acronym NC stands for *non-commercial* and means "only non-commercial use allowed", which is an unpopular limitation that makes such a license **by definition [proprietary](proprietary.md) (i.e. NOT a [free cultural](free_culture.md) license)**. This means that a work shared under a license with NC clause is prohibited from being used commercially (which itself is a very unclear statement), greatly limits the freedom of such work and opens the door for legal fuzziness and therefore possible bullying. The NC limitation appears most notably in two [Creative Commons](creative_commons.md) licenses: CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND; again, despite these licenses being Creative Commons, they are **NOT [free as in freedom](free_culture.md)** licenses -- note that this is not an opinion or controversial statement, NC licenses very clearly break the consensual definition of free cultural works and Creative Commons themselves clearly state this is the case; they justify NC licenses as part of the proprietary-free license spectrum, standing somewhere in between "all rights reserved" and free cultural licenses. Even though to free culture newcomers NC licenses don't seem like such a big deal, they are in fact extremely [harmful](harmful.md) to free culture, **DO NOT USE NC LICENSES**. NC is similar (and similarly harmful) to another proprietary license limitation: [ND](nd.md) (no derivatives allowed).
**Why are NC licenses bad?** Firstly the *Definition of Free Cultural Works* project that maintains the widely accepted definition of free culture has an article on this: https://freedomdefined.org/Definition. Let us write a summary of the arguments ALONG WITH [our own](lrs.md) arguments: