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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."
I would add an additional BSD-like clause that the name of the contributors cannot be used to promote the work:
* Neither the name of the nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
I don't know why the CC people didn't include something like this.
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I'd agree with Kline on one hand that Sturgeon's Law is being enforced - 90 percent of everything is crap.
However, the notion that publishers are filtering with my best interests in mind is also part of that 90 percent.Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
And beyond that even, I'd have to say that one man's treasure is another man's garbage.
. This sig unintentionally left blank. I meant to put something here, but I'm busy.
Well, I don't think you could build much of a publishing company based on the material in the -1 posts. Perhaps Gilmor will give it a go.
/. does have two valuable filtering functions in place; there's user moderation, of course, and there's the fact that only a few people are allowed to post stories in the first place. It was the user moderation that first caught my attention, since it's pretty effective at filtering completely worthless content (as opposed to filtering stuff that I simply disagree with). Likewise, even though I may think they're shallow, self-important, and ideologically confused, the /. editors manage to present a site that has a distinct personality. Soul, if you will.
But in reality,
This is one of the things that bugs me about Google News... yes, it does a great job of aggregating links to news stories. But there's no people behind it, and it feels that way when when I look through it.
Of course, this can be seen as a benefit, too. No person's views and unconscious bias are inflicted on you; instead, you get all available sources and opinions presented as equals in their worthiness. Then it's the reader's task to make an educated judgement of the issue, as free of editorial bias as possible. It requires critical reading skills, but I personally prefer to chew my own news, as opposed to digesting ready-chewed stuff.
That would work except that I'm talking about how I acquire the digital songs. I can't make a mix with music I don't have.
As for popularity and quality; I think popularity within a correct subgroup isn't a bad measure. That correct subgroup may not be "US total sales" (though for me with respect to music it actually works pretty well but I've got mainstream musical taste). For example you might like "Total sales within Jazz, or college radio playlist or...". Finding the right population for prefiltering is much easier than doing your own filtering.
The influence of publichers over content is not an entirely bad thing, as Kling points out. However, the substantial influence that publishers have over content can be and is abused, especially due to the incentive for publishers to steer the content market toward material it can cheaply, easily publish. This seems more intuitive in music than in writing, but I think it applies in both arenas: crap is easy to find, so if you can popularize crap, you don't have to invest in cultivating relationships with producers, you can just find some hack to fill out the formula and pass the savings on to the customer. The trouble is that rather than charge extra for the good stuff to offset the extra cost of development and promotion, many publishers offer uniform pricing and choose not to distribute material requiring a harder sell.
Kling manages to miss that that last sentence is what the CC aims to address. If that undercuts publishers, they have no one to blame but themselves.
- - - Patent applied for and deliver us from evil
AlterSlash seems to do a very good job of filtering out the drivel from Slashdot.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
I highly doubt this guy has ever read Lessig, or even understands what he means by a "creative commons".
Traditional economic arguments in favor of IPR assert that without them there will be no good content in the first place, since authors have little incentive to produce work.
But if ALL "content is crap", there is no justification for intellectual property protection in the first place. If the world gets BAD content by paying for it, and BAD content by not paying for it, the economically optimal solution is to have BAD content for FREE!
The discussion of Bayesian networks is completely irrelevant since what is at stake is a more fundamental assertion about how and why individuals innovate.
Score: Kling 0, Lessig 1.
Sorry, but that depends entirely on the 'publisher' in question. The RIAA, for example, got around this nasty problem by conglomerating many companies into one 'Association' and then making it cumpolsory for content creators to sign over their works in exchange for publication, thus making the publishers the temporary 'owners' of the content, and the associated revenue. Lawrence Lessig, in The Future of Ideas quoted the founder of MP3.com (whom I forget-but is now at Lindows) who was barraged by RIAA types who could not understand why MP3.com did not demand ownership of new artist's works before 'publishing' the music. The quote (paraphrased from memory) was something like:
"Why are you helping the next Madonna without owning the next Madonna first?!"
You are correct in saying that the the middleman should be put back in his/her place, but they have a lot more clout -- reference MP3.com's collapse...
---rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
Okay, but I'm not wrapped up in the idea of physical publishing. May I transition your points back into the digital-network arena?
Physically producing a book is a difficult task that requires time and money...
So is digitally producing a book, but the cost is distributed differently.
Writing a book only needs a monkey and a typewriter. Writing a good book needs a "talented author". Typically, it also needs a talented editor, and not simply "some friends who are willing to proofread". So right there we see two things: First, that simply authoring content doesn't guarantee the quality of that content. Second, a good editor is part of the process--a vital part currently supplied by the publisher. So it seems that publishers do provide a useful service. And since neither writing nor editing are limited to the physical realm, there doesn't seem to be any reason why the publishers shouldn't continue to add some of the same value in the digital arena as they do in the physical arena.
But what value could they add? Well, there's the aforementioned editing, which is pretty important. We can probably discard the actual "publishing" value-add, since digital networks pretty much take care of that already. But digital publishing tools and management systems will undoubtedly become more important as time goes on, so that may change.
Then there's marketing, which is the process by which publishers attempt to alert you to works you wouldn't necessarily become aware of or know how to find on your own. On the Internet, of course, we have the opposite problem: all the content is readily available and easily found. Instead of marketing, a process of pushing new content on us; we need filtering, a process of blocking the unneeded, unwanted, or otherwise valueless content. This is what Kling is talking about: filtering adds value to content, by sorting it into "valuable/not valuable" categories. I don't know about you, but I want the most efficent, most effective content filters I can get. The first company to meet that need will dominate the digital publishing world, as well it should. It will be adding quite a lot of value to the growing ocean of content, after all.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Sharpshooting CC in its infancy makes me think this guy is just afraid of change.
Who's afraid of the Creative Commons?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Consider the set of pieces of content, each identified by an url. Now map the urls into a (potentially) infinite-dimensional vector space of finite subsets of (Strings x Reals). Just give some url some finite number of pairs (keyword, rating). This act may be called rating or moderating of content. If a keyword doesn't get a value, let it be zero. Suppose you and your friends do that. Now you want your ratings to depend on your friends ratings, and your friend may want her ratings to depend on yours. To make things simple, let these dependencies be linear. So we have a digraph of people and a linear map for each arrow. The nodes are where these ratings are summed together. A sufficient condition for the system to settle (to converge) is that the maps in the arrows be contractions ("of absolute value less than one"). Just as in real life, your objects of interest would (and should) depend on your friends' ones.