Deleted 67 days ago
Viewing post in Non commercial free game
non-commercial does not mean private use. private use means private use. replace with personal where necessary.
It is indeed an interesting question. I could not find a clear answer in a short time. The internet failed me.
The problem is, that the usual licences that invoke nc are intentional ambigous worded. Intent is important here, and the mere fact that money exchanges hands, does not impact this very much. You could sell a nc work at self cost, and since you do not make a profit, it is non commercial by definition. You could not sell a nc work but make advertisment for your business with it, and the intent would be profit by usage of the nc works.
Soo ... it's complicated.
Pay what you want, starting at 0 and with no buyable premium tiers sure sounds like non commercial. But if the pwyw model works and you are a business and the irs comes knocking, it will be hard to explain, that your commercial success is based on "donations".
Till better information comes up, it will be best to look for specific use cases of the assetts in question. While it is not legally possible to claim a certain license and just modify it arbitrarily, when the license giver says on their page, they allow or do not allow pwyw, you sure know what the license giver wanted to do.
We are talking about assets. No one is using assets in a personal scenario. (Maybe for internal testing, but that is a fringe scenario no one cars about, if it does not leave your own computer anyways). So the use case of that assett being used in a donation ware game should have been discussed by the license holder. Hopefully.
This is not true.
The nc part is not about money. I did read the stuff about cc-nc, as this is probably meant with those non-commercial stuff. And they only have clauses about intent and commercial. Not about the fine and unimportant details, if you do collect money.
If your intent is to make money, it is commercial. Even if you do not collect money. You could print advertising posters for your commercial company with nc art, otherwise. Or can you do that? As I said, the internet failed me a bit here. But I did get that intent part.
Also, how do you see charity? They collect money. But it is not commercial.