[throwaway3neu94]

Most hams use commercially made equipment, this is just renting instead of buying.

What is protected is the actual radio spectrum. If a ham rented out his rig to a commercial entity for the purpose of transmitting business information over ham frequencies, that would be wrong and illegal. But here, the actual transmissions are ham radio transmissions with no commercial value (they contain no economically useful information), so it's (most likely) fine.