And nothing about clarifying what a commercial website constitutes and nothing about clarifying how media embeds are protected by CC. You guys need to do something about these very pressing questions as more and more people start to worry that their CC NC content is just used and abused by advertisment sites who make money and then claim "we are not commercial" or "embeds do not fall under any copyright" this makes CC license quite useless in the internet world and people have been waiting for a clear message on these things for the CC foundation for a VERY long time now. Everyone thought this is why you are having this quite ridiculously generic questionary a month ago.
Don´t understand me wrong I love CC but there needs to be some leadership on really pressing issues from the foundation if it wants to stay relevant in the future.

The "Defining Noncommercial" is about clarifying what a commercial website constitutes. Our RDFa work with the W3C is about building into the next version of XHTML/HTML a way to annotate each object on a web page with the proper license and attribution and this should solve the embed issue. For now, it's best to annotate it visibly and use things like, "unless otherwise noted, the content is..."

Yes but is there any progress and what is the proposed way forward and when can we expect a clarification? An additional license for "ad supported" websites?

Great news on the embed issue - is there any more information and nitty gritty details of this proposal anywhere?

Thank you for the explanation of your view and the link to the RDFa spec.

As for the commerciality problem:

I am on the hardcore side - thats why I am asking - had long discussions about this over the past years with lawyers, netactivists, content creators and normal people. I am coming from a content creation standpoint and I am absolutely positive that if people choose "non commercial" they also mean "no ad supported websites" because the gray area is actually quite dark grey as "infrastructure" can be considered widely. For example musician friends who publish pretty much exclusively under creative commons have found that their songs are on a LOT of blogs that are doing nothing else then collecting "free" CC licensed music - these blogs have no additional content and are full of ads - hence they are generating a revenue - he has written some of the people demanding that they take their music down - because they do not want anybody generating money with what they create they just want to share it freely. The answer is almost always the same "we are a not generating profit we just run the site" after further asking they admit that they pay staff and their own life with some of the revenue but they say no money is left over at the end of the month making them "non profit".
You see this is a BIG problem - I am aware of the questionary the CC foundation did and took part but the questions were at point in my opinion very misleading and some extremely redundand and didn´t really get to the point - namely that people are earning money with other peoples work - not making a profit per se but making money nonetheless. With all the discussions I had the only viable solution anyone came up with is an addition tag to the CC license that excludes ad sites.
The big problem is that the people who are benefiting from gray zone the most are those having big blogs already so they influence the discussion heavely - from people who are in that field you get only the answer "oh its fine as it is no clarification needed" the serious content producers (the guys from the example above have at the moment the most downloaded CC song in germany - ever) are all in agreement that as long as there is a gray zone it will be exploited and nobody has the time, energy or money to go to court about each and every breach if it is a gray area and in the end you might even loose against the sharlatans that rip of your work doing nothing else then posting a freaking link - sometimes work you have produces over month´s.
CC should take side formost with the content creators, then next with the end users and only last should it consider the distribution channel because that is most commercial in the chain and that is also the link that would benefit most from "gray".

I hope you might consider this comment in your thought process. I would gladly give more opinion from the content producers perspective if there is a place and need for that as I have been following this problem for quite some time and there is clearly dissent in the artist community - some seriously considering moving back to normal copyright shemes because CC does not offer them enough protection - which would undo a lot of the work of the CC foundation and would be a real shame.