We live in a world of conversation, of language; all full of words. Mastery of language requires learning the meanings of thousands of words. The average native English language speaker uses in the realm of 12,000 to 20,000 words, whereas a college graduate would use 20-25,000 words. Shakespeare actively used more then 30,000 words, and his vocabulary was estimated to be over 66,000 words. Yet there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabularies.

Last year I participated in a survey followed up by a focus group on the topic of Noncommercial Use, in particular around the context that about 2/3rds of the Creative Commons licenses extant use the NC attribute, such as in CC-BY-NC. Defining "Noncommercial":  A Study of how the Online Population Understands "Noncommercial" Use http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Defining_Noncommercial The topic is somewhat of a sticky one, as there are many competing interests. There are content creators who wish to profit from their work, there are other content creators who don't want anyone to profit (even themselves), and of course there are content creators who want everything to be free provided you share free content back.