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Carping Over Creative Commons
scubacuda writes "Arnold Kling, in his article, Content is Crap, writes, 'While there are many Net-heads who share Dan Gillmor's [and Larry Lessig's] enthusiasm for Creative Commons, I do not. It has little or no significance, because it is based on a strikingly naive 60's-retro ideological view of how content intermediaries function.' He compares artists' works to, well, raw sewage that publishers filter into something that can be later consumed by the public. 'What Creative Commons lets you do as an author is label your stuff before you flush it down the toilet.' Kling points to Bayesian Intermediaries (filters based on flexible keyword weights and 'trained' by user preferences) and weblogs as good ways to filter out the drivel that many content creators produce. (Dan Gilmore and Siva Vaidhayanatha respond, to which Kling responds in his blog."
Well I must say I don't like the sewage analogy, but overall I do agree with the point. I would say that instead of sewage, authors (anyone who is creating something) often produce the raw ingredients for a meal--and it is the publisher who "cooks" the meal.
Having experience at a small publishing company, I can say that a large number of authors have no idea how much work is needed to produce a book. Not just authors--a vast majority of slashdot viewers (and people in general) don't have any idea either I'm sure. Making a book even once an author has completed the manuscript is still time consuming and difficult--not just sending it to the press and saying 'done!'.
To anyone who says publishers aren't needed, I'd advise them to try a job at a publishing shop for a short time, and see how they like the work.
Just what content does he think he'll be able to Baysian Filter without more open content licenses?
Ok I can tell you a couple things that it's a 100% sure that consumers want in books. Good spelling, properly formatted pages, sentences that make sense, tables of contents and indexes that are correct, covers that look good, footnotes in proper order and together, uniform citation styles, diagrams referred to properly and in the right locations, and I could keep going. If you think all this is easy, I would advise you to seek a job in the publishing industry--sounds like some publishers could really use your help!
You wouldn't believe the state of some manuscripts that come in..
How many minor art film festivals do you go to? How many college author's books do you read? How many open art exhibitions?
The idea (which seems true to me) is that consumers do not want to have to choose between thousands of products most of which are bad but dozens of products most of which are good. Getting from thousands to dozens requires that 99% of the products be filtered.
For example I personally tend to for way more filtering buying almost always "greatest hits albums". I want multiple filters:
a) The group got a contract
b) The record was successful
c) Multiple records were succesful from the same group
d) The 10% best songs from the records were choosen.
I hate "live music" at bars and clubs because most of it is so bad. While I may be unusual in the degree of filtering I want for music, the basic idea is not atypical. Further many people have the same filtering for books (where I personally choose from a much wider range); and will only read books that are classics (i.e. have sold well for generations) or only read books that are massive best sellers. The Oprah book club (best new literary fiction each month) worked well because having to only pick 1 book per month Oprah could make it a very good one. Other people only go to the most succesful movies....
So no I don't think consumers have any interest in choosing between such a wide range of sources.
Frankly why are you getting your tech news from slashdot if not to get a filtered selection of the hundreds of tech news sites?
Filters!
These filters are why most if not near all of editorial cartoonists are white male 25-55. These "filters" are why many of the people here are here and not reading Main-stream-content.
The whole bunch of these fools think that there is some Content-Value in the control of the media. Some how the exclusion of some parts is enhancing the parts they let you see. That their view of what is good and bad is Added-Value. I am not so sure they do add anything. Nor do I think that never allowing the bad-stuff to be seen will do anything but obscure the contrast.
Imagine sports where we only get to watch only the winner play alone.
> He compares artists' works to, well, raw sewage that publishers filter into something that can be later consumed by the public.
Yeah, but when the publisher in question is the RIAA they filter out all the good stuff and pass all the lip-sync dance-sync boy-band crap on to the consumer.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Having experience at a small publishing company, I can say that a large number of authors have no idea how much work is needed to produce a book.
While there is some truth in that of course, it is only part of the truth. The much larger truth is that without the content, the publisher has nothing, ZERO, zilch. Commensurate with this, the publisher does not really deserve much credit nor profit --- he is a middleman, useful, but still just a middleman.
Furthermore, the "no idea how much work is needed" response is often used to justify the continued existence of the middleman even when he is no longer necessary. If technology respected such words of caution, we'd have no desktop publishing, no home video and graphics production, and no home music studios. And of course, the individual artist would always be just a tiny cog in an immense machine.
The middleman does need to be put in his rightful place --- not necessarily extinction, but certainly in a limited niche.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
- It's likely that a given piece of Creative Commons content is going to be crap because 90% of everything is crap (this is known as Sturgeon's Law, BTW).
- Content intermediaries produce mediocre results, but it's still better than crap.
- Maybe the answer is not to guarantee that there is free crap available, but to offer a way to filter out the crap, without having to pay a middleman.
Makes more sense now?Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
Essentially all the parts of a user agreement are reduced to a set of easily recognizable icons/keywords (from a set of 10) which detail what copyrights and licenses and granted and reserved under the agreement. So when you visit a website or buy a software package, instead of reading 30 pages of EULA's (which no one does anyway) and clicking "I Agree," you will see a set of Icons/Keywords which abbreviate the agreement so you can Agree/Decline. The legal elements represented by the agreement icons/keywords are universal -- so the icons ($), (=), etc means the same thing for every user agreement regardless of content provider. Providers can customize their agreements by choosing a set of icons which best represents what licenses they want to reserve and which ones they want to grant. Users benefit because they only need to read the text of the 10 possible licenses for a possible infinite number of service/content providers.
The argument, "Sure I clicked agree, but I didn't read it," is becoming more and more compelling to courts and shrink wrap licenses are becoming endangered of being ruled invalid because they are not easily accessible. By following the creative commons model, providers can be protected because they follow a universal license model that can be easily recognized and understood by users. Likewise, users can know everything they are agreeing to because the provider can't sneak spying provisions into the CC licenses and still represent the license with the CC icons.
Btw, I love it when some sniveling, little Reagan-ite calls constitutionally guaranteed freedom and liberty "60's era" or "naive." What they're really saying is "Sure, liberty sounds good...But facism and elitism just make more sense in modern society."
This argument is not new in publishing circles. In fact, everyone from publishing industry executives to Spider Robinson (in a televised interview on the Space Channel) takes a crack at it every so often, and it goes like this:
Since Sturgeon's Law applies to all forms of content creation, publishers serve the valuable function of separating the wheat from the chaff and presenting us, the buying/reading public, with only the best of what's available.
Unfortunately, there are a few flaws with this argument. First of all, who decides what's the "best"? The guy who gave the go-ahead to publish The Bridges of Madison County? Literary critics? The New York Times Review of Books? Secondly, using sales numbers as the only arbiter of "good" or "bad" in an artistic venture is a really strange way of looking at art, one which sort of presupposes that that which is marketable is (de facto and de jure) automatically "good." (See argument one.) Thirdly, it's entirely possible for famous, well-respected, and talented content creators to have their entire careers axed by one failed venture. Don't believe me? Ask Norman Spinrad, author of Bug Jack Barron, and The Iron Dream among others. It happened to him, and it's happened (according to my own research) to many other authors (I'm afraid I can't really name names here, though).
See, the way the publishing biz operates, it works similarly to many areas in our society (like electoral politics, and the private sector, for two): If you've already got the "name" and you've got lots of money (or a couple of bestsellers in the hole), you're practically guaranteed to stay a success. If, on the other hand, you have to compete against the "brand names" and everybody else submitting their work 'over-the-transom', your chances of achieving even that first foot-in-the-door publication are very small. Your talent, or lack thereof, isn't usually much of a deciding factor.
So given all that, these guys making this Social Darwinism In Publishing argument really piss me off, because they're completely disconnected from publishing biz reality as we know it...either that, or they've got their lucrative contract, so they really genuinely believe that the stacked deck affords equality of opportunity. Therefore, obviously, the rather McLuhanesque (the retro-60's naivete Kling refers to?) levelling Creative Commons is a bad thing. Right.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
For the kind of "raw sewage" Kling produces, we don't need a Bayesian filter to detect it--it stinks enough without it.
I agree with him in one sense... not that content is crap, and not with his overall tone or message, but that there is significant value in the filtering process. Not corporate filtering, or automated filtering, but review-based filtering.
I've thought for a long time now that, with advances in technology (home-studio-produced music, professional-quality DV software on PCs, etc.), and with advances in distribution (the Internet), we're moving into a different sort of creative "space" where anyone who wants to make art can make art, and have it be seen by anyone. That's unbelievably cool, but it makes "consumption" more difficult, as it's much harder to find work that interests you.
The solution is reviews. Preferably from as many sources as possible. I see us in a situation where we actively pick reviewers whose taste matches ours, and who gain our trust. These are our filters. This already exists in the medium of web sites -- what are Slashdot, MetaFilter, Plastic, and K5, among many others? They're filters for web content. We don't have time to scour the entire web every day for pages that interest us, so we go sites who've obtained our trust, and we let them filter this content.
As I read his love-letter to the publishing industry, which basically said that the output of authors, artists, et al was "crap" which was then filtered by value-adding publishers (Puh-LEASE), I couldn't help but think that if these publishers were any good at filtering crap, we would never have heard of Mr. Kling in the first place.
I like the idea of a creative commons, though. Kudos to the crew that created it.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
First, he suggests that CC and publishers cannot co-exist, that the media world is not big enough for the two of them. I disagree with this notion.
Unless I've missed something, CC does not preclude authors from having their works filtered and distributed by publishers, it just gives them another alternative. Moreover, it gives authors who are ignored by publishers a means to protect their works and seek other distribution methods.
Secondly, Kling's quote
is highly presumptuous. First, how do the publishers know what I do not want? They've never asked me! But more importantly, it is this attitude that causes publishers to cater to the lowest common denominator -- to distribute only what they think a sizable percentage of the population would like. Without options like CC, works by authors and artists that the publishers deem "crap" might never be available.
I myself read a lot of comic books and zines. Personally, I LIKE independent press works and go out of my way to find them. Some of the most interesting stuff I've found has been created and distributed by the author/artist on a shoe-string budget (photocopied on plain paper, folded down the middle and stapled once).
I disagree that such things are crap, just because they aren't on glossy paper, with airbrushed technocolor, aren't produced by one of the brand name publishers (Marvel, DC, Image, etc.), etc.
Yes, there is a lot of crap out there too, but I'd like to be able to judge for myself, rather than leave that decision up to people whose opinions clearly differ from my own.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Certainly, literary critics will become more important in the future. Those people adding value by aiding people in finding the gems and improving writing of the writers are not going to disappear. No, they will obviously become more important as the amount of stuff increases.
But they do not anymore have a veto, as publishers had before. That's the only real difference.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I don't see how this state of affairs is the publishing industry's fault. If anything, it is the fault of the consuming public. People, which are generally stupid creatures, care more that an author is well-known and popular, than whether his writing is worth any more than the paper it's written on. If authors continue to succeed, even when their work doesn't merit success, then it's because the sheep-like public continue purchasing their trash -- NOT because the publishing company chooses to market it.
On the flip side, if an unknown author can't get his life's work published, even though it's an amazing piece of literature, that's probably because the publisher has (correctly) realized that the aforementioned sheep-like public won't realize what they've got.
Hell, if I was a publisher, I'd act precisely the same way. Why waste money marketing an intellectual masterpiece if its content is going to be lost on the vast majority of idiots? Conversely, why shouldn't I publish garbage, if people are choosing to buy such garbage? It's just sane business practice.
If you're really upset at the state of publishing, then go scream at your idiot mom/brother/boss. They're the ones pumping the money into this drivel. People read what they like. Unfortunately, what they seem to like most is brain-dead, lifeless, putrid trash.
And my whole book series, too. At least it's sewage that sells well, helps people get a job done, and gets good reviews :-)
Bruce Perens.
You really need to read more clearly if you are going to be accusing others of logical errors. I do specifically address the issue of unfiltered choice in the very context where I first make that point. In context:
"How many minor art film festivals do you go to? How many college author's books do you read? How many open art exhibitions? The idea (which seems true to me) is that consumers do not want to have to choose between thousands of products most of which are bad but dozens of products most of which are good. Getting from thousands to dozens requires that 99% of the products be filtered. "
In other words there are plenty of avenues by which people can see unfiltered film, unfiltered art, unfiltered music, unfiltered literature. They exist, they are quite inexpensive (often free) and they are very poorly attended. Its not that people don't know about these venues its that they quite deliberately choose to avoid them.
Most people have very few areas of their lives in which they want to make detailed choices. You may find this offensive but I've provided quite a bit of evidence for it and if you can for a moment think about your own life you yourself make use of it. I think the particular case of music you find offensive because you probably do select from a much wider range (as I mentioned I do for books where I am much more of an expert and am willing to spend more filtering for myself).
Now stop thinking with your emotions while claiming I'm making a logical falicy. Reread the original post and if it helps replace music with best selling spice racks.
Wait a minute, someone wrote the code and filters that Google News uses. So there's still an inherent bias, although it may be at one remove. There's certainly "people behind it", just in a different way.
This is not to say I don't like Google News. It's just that saying that it's unbiased is a somewhat dangerous assumption.
grib.
maybe