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.

CrunchBase President Matt Kaufman also told me, “People+ has agreed to operate under our revised Terms of Service,” which presumably ends the legal fight.

(Conflict of interest alert: As the names imply, CrunchBase and TechCrunch have always had close ties, and we’re part of the same team at AOL.)

The dispute arose when CrunchBase tried to stop the startup from using its data, suggesting that People+ was just creating a copycat competitor. The position taken by People+, and then by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was that CrunchBase had the right to decide who uses its API, but People+ had the right to continue using the data it had already collected, because it was licensed under Creative Commons.

Put another way: The CrunchBase team ended up looking like it didn’t really understand how Creative Commons worked.

But like I said, it seems like the legal situation is resolved, and the new terms seem to prevent similar conflicts in the future. As I understand it (and I’m still waiting for confirmation from Kaufman that I’ve got this right), the big change is that the data is is only available under Creative Commons for non-commercial use. If the use is commercial, you’ll need to get a license from CrunchBase.

Here’s how the CrunchBase blog post describes the process:

Our revised Terms of Service provide additional clarity on how the CrunchBase dataset can be leveraged for research and application development. Following our commitment to make the terms as clear as possible, CrunchBase worked closely with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to incorporate Creative Commons 4.0 and to follow established best practices.

Meanwhile, a People+ spokesperson sent me the following statement:

We have been overwhelmed and thankful for the support of EFF and the tech community particularly Hacker News and some of the original team who created CrunchBase. We are thrilled with the outcome and are looking forward to continue growing our product and the company far beyond this controversy.