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The problem is the definition of commercial use.

A German court ruled a few years back that use of a creative commons image by a non-profit publically funded television station was "commercial use" with the argumentation that "had the CC-NC image not existed they would have had to license an image and pay for it". Another German court ruling decided that a personal blog containing any sort of advertising qualifies as "commercial use" (in the context of the exemption from making the operator contact information visible on websites operated for personal use). The definition of commercial use is not clear-cut and definitely not in line with US rulings. This is why Art11 is a significant increase in reach. Small organizations and nonprofits operating mailing lists with a web interface would now have to screen all messages to make sure nobody quotes a news snippet. Same with forums and such. And of course it would shut down wikinews (wikipedia is explicitly and narrowly excluded, other wikimedia projects are not) and other user-operated news agregators where users are likely to quote parts of articles.




> Another German court ruling decided that a personal blog containing any sort of advertising qualifies as "commercial use"

Erm, you say that like it's something we're supposed to disagree with?


Yeah, my point is that the law makes no distinction between something like google news that has news snippets as its main business, and something like a personal blog or forum that contains advertising or collects donations to cover server expenses. Both would be classified as "commercial use" in Germany and would fall under this law. This means that forum operators now have to police their users to make sure nobody posts a news snippet.


If you host your blog on a free host, where the host inserts ads to offset the cost of the free hosting - is that commercial use?


I'm not sure - the host would clearly be commercial use under German law - I don't know about the user. But for this law, it doesn't matter - it would become the host's responsibility to police the content of the user.


Yes, it's commercial use on the part of the host.


I literally cannot believe


Here's commentary on the court decision (in German) with links to the actual decision:

https://netzpolitik.org/2014/urteil-des-lg-koeln-zu-creative...




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