Many data sources on the web are licensed under non-commercial licenses. There are understandable reasons for data publishers to choose non-commercial licensing: Their data might have been funded with tax money, or they license the content from other content creators under contracts that only allow non-commercial republishing.

The intention is that the data should be available to anyone who doesn’t earn any income by using the data.

But there’s a huge problem: Not earning any income isn’t equivalent to non-commercial usage. A consultation done by Creative Commons has shown that a large share of content publishers consider all services and web sites run by a for-profit organisation commercial usage. Even if those offerings do not generate any income at all.

That creates a large uncertainty for companies and startups: You don’t know whether a data license actually permits the usage of content for your free service, but instead you need to sign custom agreements with each data publisher, approving that your definition of non-commercial meets their definition.

I doubt that was the intention behind data licenses such as Creative Common Noncommercial…

Let me cite from CC-BY-NC 3.0: “You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.”

Both primarily and commercial advantage are quite vague, and that’s the main harm:
License terms should not be vague!

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