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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.
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.
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.
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.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Yep. Much as slashdot will deny it, yahoo is actually getting to be better than google these days.
I am trolling