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If I use a sound licensed under a Creative Commons that doesn't allow commercial uses in a non-commercial project, and I accept donations, would that be considered a violation on the terms of the license?

Sorry for the late response.

You've definitely hit a grey area, and I don't have a definitive answer for you.

Initially you'd think yes, but that only counts if you are specifically asking for donations for the work you made that includes Creative Commons sounds, or make it clear that's what you're doing. For example a free audio release on bandcamp with the option to donate.

Now, say you just accept personal donations in general and has nothing to do with any one piece of work then you could argue that this is not related to your license terms. The donations would be to you as an artist and not for individual work created.

I'm not a lawyer and don't speak authoritatively, but I hope this helps a bit. I would advise to err on the side of caution as always.

If I understand it correctly, accepting personal donations isn't considered "commercial usage" as it's not specifically for the work, but rather to keep living? That definitely sounds like a gray area to me. An objective educated insight into this from a lawyer would be good, actually.

Here are my thoughts tho:

I guess "commercial use" may also include monetization on YouTube, which is effectively paying for specific work on the platform, because it's individual to each video. You can get your entire channel demonetized, or a single specific video.

So I guess if my channel is monetized and my videos are monetized, I can't use any CC-AT-NC sound samples in my videos because that would be actually a licence violation. If I wanted to use any of that sound in a video, I would have to disable monetization on the video (which turns ads off on the video).

My channel on YT isn't monetized yet (I hardly even have content to watch, let alone subscribers needed to gain monetization, but that's a subject to change; YT allows channels with at least 1k subs and at least 4k hours of watchtime per year, and of course a valid AdSense account). That means I could make money only with donations from fans. Until I'm eligible to enable monetization.

CZghost wrote:
I guess "commercial use" may also include monetization on YouTube

That is correct