“noncommericial” seems pernicious to me lately. I can see why people reach for it, but it really seems hard to define (there are many ways to profit off of something without simply selling it directly).
This has always been my problem with CC-NC, its just not clear to me what counts as "commercial" or not.
Can't sell the item itself? Okay, makes sense.
What about a downstream manufactured item? Such as a CC-NC STL, where you have since 3d printed it? You can't sell the STL, but what about the printed object? If not for profit, must you necessarily take a loss, or could you sell the items at-cost?
Or offering a CC-NC item for free, in the same place you are selling other products for profit? Where the CC-NC item may be acting as a "loss-leader" to get customers to purchase your commercial offerings?
Or giving everything away, the CC-NC item and all other items, but while representing a commercial entity who is doing such for marketing purposes with the end-goal of generating more revenue for the business?
I much prefer GPL/CC-SA licenses, they're much clearer where the line sits in regards to usage.
Don't most of these licenses also include "derived works". The trivial case, you get an STL, you print the object, it's clearly derived, you get some code, you edit parts of it for a new application, it's clearly derived.
Personally I feel it's also fairly trivial that an AI model is a derived work, but...there is so much money, people risk it (eg early Spotify and sourcing music) and hope it becomes a non-issue.
HOWEVER, as China and co are going to wholesale ignore any IP/copyright to train AI models, the choice we have...may not be much of a choice at all.
IANAL, but I think it goes even one step beyond that, which is that the item and derived works can't even be used to support a commercial enterprise, even if the (derived) work isn't being sold or seen by the outside public.
I'm sure Harvard doesn't consider its use as commercial, even though some people there get big salaries. Claudine Gay, for instance, makes more than $1m/year even after losing the job of President in the scandal. There are only a few "commercial" businesses that pay that well.
