Two weeks ago we started looking into The Conversations Network’s use of the Creative Commons Sampling License, which is no longer officially supported by CC. We received terrific feedback including this email from CC founder Lawrence Lessig, who is also on our own Board of Advisors:

As others have commented, the license continues to be served (and will always be served) and you are free to use it. The Sampling Plus license is preferred of course, but of course it permits noncommercial reposting. While that is inconsistent in theory with your objectives, I would urge you to think practically about it. There are not many incentives to hosting large files that are not commercial, so while there may be a few who do it, I wouldn’t think it would be deeply inconsistent with your objectives to allow it.

For a variety of reasons, we’ve decided to stick with the existing CC Sampling License, at least for the time being. It really does come closest to meeting our set of objectives. But we’ll continue to review this issue on a regular basis.