Creative Commons FAQ: Is use X a violation of the Noncommercial clause of the licenses?
Creative Commons study: “Defining ‘Noncommercial’: A Study of How the Online Population Understands ‘Noncommercial Use'” Creative Commons listserv: “Use cases for NonCommercial license clause” The CC study linked above might be particularly helpful. In September 2009, CC published the results of an extensive survey gauging how creators and users in the U.S. online population define “non-commercial.” One part of the survey presented respondents with specific uses and asked them to rate the uses on a 0-100 scale, where 0 was “definitely a non-commercial use” and 100 was “definitely a commercial use.” The study summarized the results: “[C]reators and users generally consider uses that earn users money or involve online advertising to be commercial in nature, while uses by organizations, by individuals, or for charitable purposes are less commercial (but not decidedly noncommercial) and harder to classify overall. Qualifiers, such as whether the user is a not-for-profit organization or for
