Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

NonCommercial Creative Commons licence. Free reuse for non-commercial purposes only, with attribution.

CC BY-NC 4.0 permits reuse, modification, and redistribution but only for non-commercial purposes. The licence defines NonCommercial as 'not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation' — a definition that has produced significant interpretation difficulty in practice.

NonCommercial licences are not classified as 'open' under the Open Definition because they restrict reuse based on purpose, which excludes commercial public-interest use cases (academic publishing with paid access, news organisations, civic-tech consultancies). The Free Cultural Works definition (which CC BY-NC fails) is the same.

For the petermr blog post on interconverting CC-NC licences referenced in the inbound link record: NC restrictions are particularly painful when combining datasets with mixed commercial-use status, because the most-restrictive component governs the combined result.