Confusion and Complexity: High time to prune the Creative Commons licenses?

“In a recent blog, Nina Paley, the animator behind the
free-licensed animated film, “Sita Sings the Blues”, complained of
the enormous confusion caused by poor differentiation of the
Creative Commons licenses. In particular, there’s a great deal of
confusion over the difference between “NonCommercial” and
“ShareAlike” licenses. Maybe the Creative Commons licensing system
is still too complex? I’d suggest that only three licenses are
really needed: “Attribution” (CC By), “ShareAlike” (CC By-SA), and
“NonCommercial” (CC By-NC), and that the others are essentially
deadweight that’s holding the movement back.

“In a recent blog, Nina Paley with the degree to which Creative
Commons’ “NonCommercial” and “ShareAlike” terms are confused by
distributors. It is frequently assumed that “ShareAlike” works can
only be used in non-commercial ways, and this is absolutely
contrary to the intent of licensors like Paley who’ve chosen
“ShareAlike” licensing, precisely because it does permit commercial
re-use:

“This is a real problem. Some artists have re-released Sita
remixes under Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses. Many
bloggers and journalists assume the non-commercial restrictions,
even when the license is correctly named”

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