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Comment by ctingom | Hacker News Reader

Note: Embedded images may not be used for commercial purposes.

Where commercial use is essentially undefined (except for obvious cases like advertising and directly selling the photo as a product).

In this case, commercial use has 2 meanings. 1- In any context where the image is used to support the sale or promotion of a product or a service. This is basically non-editorial use. Example: any image on a corporate website. 2- Put on any website that, although editorial, has enough visitors that people make a living out of it. This is the vague area you are referring to, am I right? Where is the frontier between a personal blog and a commercial one?

At CrowdMedia.co, we only allow editorial use for 2 reasons. You need model release for commercial use (from any recognizable person, brand, design, building), and a lot of photographers just don't want their photos in an ad for a company with what they consider wrong corporate values.

Correct. Non-editorial use is reasonably clear and, at least ostensibly in many cases, also requires model releases of the sort that stock photo sites require of photographers. As you note.

Non-commercial, as in "not related to making money," has never been well-defined and Creative Commons has consistently punted on this topic. Their last attempt to define it has been languishing for a good 5 years now. The problem is that if you eliminate all uses that encroach on money--e.g. an ostensibly personal blog that is related to my professional business in some way--you're left with uses that are essentially trivial. And, by the way, it doesn't really matter if there's no meeting of the minds about what constitutes commercial use and there probably won't be.

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