This question is about using material under non-commercial licenses, rather than distributing them.
There are quite a few technical tutorials out there that are licensed under non-commercial CC licenses. An example is the Git book on Git's website, which is under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0.
Does reading the tutorial to learn the technical subject for work violate the NC terms?
What about downloading the file locally first? What about if the only way to access the work was to download it?
I think the answer to these questions may hinge upon whether any of these count as reproducing the work, since the NC condition only relates to reproducing and sharing, and sharing of course does not apply here. Version 3.0 makes the word "reproduce" a defined term. Version 4.0 does not.
