Another View of Creative Commons

[rolanni]

Nipped from badgermirlacca on a list we both frequent.

Creative Commons Humbug
By John C. Dvorak

Will someone explain to me the benefits of a trendy system developed by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford? Dubbed Creative Commons, this system is some sort of secondary copyright license that, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing but threaten the already tenuous "fair use" provisos of existing copyright law. This is one of the dumbest initiatives ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb. Eye-rolling dumb on the same scale as believing the Emperor is wearing fabulous new clothes.

If you are unfamiliar with this thing, be sure to go to the Web site and see if you can figure it out. Creative Commons actually seems to be a dangerous system with almost zero benefits to the public, copyright holders, or those of us who would like a return to a shorter-length copyright law.

The rest of the editorial here

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

I thought he made some good points, about this underlying the protections already in place. (I almost posted a link to this in my journal, too, but got distracted.)

I mean, if I want my work distributed freely for non-profit uses only, I can just say that, and still hold all the other rights.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Professor Lessig, the ...intellect that formed the creative commons notion is rather prone to thinking up Huge Problems(tm) that don't exist and then trying to change the world in order to correct the imaginary problem. In my more uncharitable moments, I think he's doing it to get tenure -- but, really, he probably has tenure by this point.

One of the good professor's other bright ideas is that there are hundreds of thousands of "orphaned" works littering the artistic landscape, unfairly locked away from cultural exploitation by draconian and antiquated copyright laws. In fact, there are not huge numbers of "orphaned" works; most copyright holders can be discovered by simply expending a little effort, but Professor Lessig didn't bother to find that out -- or he knows it and deliberately ignores it, because acknowledging the fact would mean his cool theory was useless.

...not that I'm completely out of patience with the man, or anything...