CrunchBase Reaches Agreement With People+, Announces New Terms Of Service
Following a legal dispute with Pro Populi, the company behind startup database People+, CrunchBase is announcing new terms of service. CrunchBase data will now be available through a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license.
Context & Ripple Effects
The settlement closes a fight that flared up last month, when Wired reported that AOL's [[a:1200435|legal threat against a startup for reusing CrunchBase content it had solicited from the community]] made the site's free-to-contribute, murky-to-reuse terms untenable. The resolution is a license: CrunchBase data now carries an explicit Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 grant, and Pro Populi's People+ gets defined terms instead of a cease-and-desist posture.
The pickup list here is unusual for a terms-of-service post — the EFF, TechnoLlama and Wired all covered it the same week — which reflects how the dispute became a test case for who owns crowd-contributed data. It also lands on top of CrunchBase's April 2013 push to turn the dataset into a distribution channel via the CrunchBase Venture Network, making the non-commercial carve-out a business decision as much as a legal one.
First-order effects
- People+/Pro Populi can keep building on CrunchBase data without litigation risk, but only within the Attribution-NonCommercial boundary the new terms draw.
- Every other developer reusing CrunchBase data gains a written license where informal norms previously governed use — and loses the ability to claim ambiguity about commercial reuse.
Second-order effects
- Competitors and commercial data aggregators that treated CrunchBase as a free feed must now either negotiate separate terms or fund their own data collection, raising their cost floor relative to a platform whose contributors work for exposure.
- The non-commercial restriction pushes monetization toward CrunchBase itself, reinforcing the API-and-partnership model the Venture Network launched earlier in 2013 rather than open redistribution.
Third-order effects
- Crowdsourced databases are converging on a template: community contributions flow in freely while outbound reuse is gated by license type, forcing a public debate over whether contributors' output can be commercially fenced.
- If that template holds, expect disputes like this one to shift from court threats to license-compliance questions — with organizations like the EFF positioned as the recurring voice on where the permission line sits.
The trend: Crowd-built data platforms are replacing ambiguous terms of service with explicit open-but-noncommercial licenses, trading viral reuse for control over the commercial layer built on their data.