SciVee is a sort-of YouTube for scientific papers. People can upload videos related to publications from any journal.

I was curious about the licensing issues, so I checked their Terms of Use page. Right at the start, it says, “When you publish on this site, you agree that you have the rights to publish the video and that you are licensing the video under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.”

Okay, that’s clear enough, but then there’s a contradiction just a little bit later on the page: “SciVee applies the Creative Commons license to all of the video content on this site in order to make the work freely available for non-commercial purposes.”

Do you see the contradiction?

The problem is that the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License allows for commercial purposes. If they wanted to avoid licensing commercial uses, they should be applying one of the Creative Commons licenses with a noncommercial clause, like Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0.

I think the problem stems from the mistaken belief that there is only one Creative Commons license.

In any case, if you know someone associated with SciVee, could you please contact them and get this repaired?

UPDATE: I finally contacted them and now the SciVee Terms of Use appear to be unambiguous: submitted content gets a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.