Interesting.

So, 1. the text files have long been publicly available, since before the acquisition and 2. it was not a commercial project prior to acquistion.

Who wrote the non-commercial license? Was that also written before the acquisition?

Wikipedia has the history of imdb:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Movie_Database

User-generated content. Make a list of factual information. Accept submissions from users. Watch it grow. Then partner with a large company to sell products. And sell licenses to the data for $15K/year. (Give the top contributers a "free" membership to something to keep them from suing you.) Yeah, that could work.

Movie information, restaurant reviews, video clips, you name it. The miracle of user-generated content.