Yahoo Adds Search for Creative Commons Content

BlakeCaldwell writes "Yahoo has added the ability to search specifically for content with unconventional copyright arrangements. The search tool was produced in order to help promote Creative Commons' efforts to advocate the use of nontraditional copyright arrangements between digital content developers and people interested in licensing those individuals' work. The group said that most of the content available through the Yahoo search can be licensed for free under required attribution or noncommercial usage guidelines." Commentary on Lawrence Lessig's Blog.

Comments

Why Google can't do this

[afree87]

Google's "pages that link to this page" (link:) algorithm has been broken for quite a while, especially in the case of Creative Commons licenses. It only shows a fraction of the pages linking. I believe this has something to do with the PageRank code. In any case, it makes their Creative Commons searches very small.

On the other hand, if anyone at Google found it worth their time, they could start taking note of RDF data in the page to mark it as Creative Commons.

Re:Yahoo is good?

[alexandreracine]

They are releasing a feature that allows them to make money (adds) from people who share their stuff for free for people who do not want to make money from people who say that you can use their material if used for no money purpose.

Clear?

Trust?

[Valthezeh]

After doing a few searches, I'm really confused by the results coming up - some are posted on news sites, and other places where my first assumption is definitely not that I can just take the image and go on my way with no worries. Are we just supposed to trust that the search engine *actually* found media we can safely use? Because somehow I don't think that my college will be too happy with me if I try to use that as an excuse when I'm being accused of stealing someone else's intellectual property.

It still seems that making sure the image is really free for use has to be the responsibility of the person doing the search, and it looks like in some cases this is going to require at least a little bit of extra searching.

Still a cool idea, and I hope they continue to improve on it.

Re:Trust?

[MenTaLguY]

Are we just supposed to trust that the search engine *actually* found media we can safely use?

Empthatically no! It's always going to require resonsibility on the part of the person doing the search and using the content.

This isn't something that can feasibly be enforced through technological means; it's not a technologically tractable problem, and any serious attempts would basically end up being crappy DRM that still didn't work.

The point of having the machine-readable descriptions and a search engine like this is that it can at least do the hard work of finding candidate works for you to evaluate.

Waiting for Yahoo or Google to provide the content

[PornMaster]

I'd like to see a company like Yahoo or Google pick up the ball and start a Bittorrent tracker service for creative commons content with a centralized directory-style index.

Phukkin A

[mshiltonj]

Amazing -- they one-upped Google on the coolness factor. Good for them! Bookmarked.

Re:Yahoo is good?

[m50d]

Yep. Much as slashdot will deny it, yahoo is actually getting to be better than google these days.

Re:Yahoo is good?

[BandwidthHog]

I know I'll use it at times. Sure, 95% of users will never know about it or utilize it. But of the small fraction of users who are content creators, I imagine a sizable number of them will utilize it.

And more importantly, the first thing that went through my mind upon seeing this was that I now have a much stronger incentive to get some of my better pictures posted and accessible. The reason for that is that I would allow my stuff to be used in this manner, but never bothered to put it out there, because who'll ever find it, and when someone does stumble across it in an image search, chances are they won't be aware of the whole CC thing. This changes both of those assumptions.

So I say Yay! for Yahoo!