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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.
Yahoo did something good? hm.
Bullish Machine Tzar
I tried a few different searches on a range of topics and on pretty much every page there was no notice of non-traditional license and most had a copyright notice at the bottom.
The former, I know, has explicit methods to label content as Creative Commons or other types of license.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Microsoft announced today that they are adding a new feature to MSN search, which allows you to restrict the search results to information and works with severe license restrictions. A Microsoft spokesman said, "We believe that when you look at Total Cost of Ownership, you will find that our heavily restricted content provides a better value than works that are in the public domain. After all, Moby Dick is only free if your time is worth nothing." A followup statement attributed the confusing nature of the previous statement to the spokesman's overly tight necktie.
Unknown host pong.
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.
In my experience, I've hardly ever seen anything with a "Creative Commons" logo that wasn't a blog. As if anyone would care to use a sample of the countless bundles of crap that are blogs. *yawn*
However, it's not clear to me how they decide what to index. There doesn't seem to be any explanation of that under Yahoo's "Learn more..." link. When I tested the Yahoo index, they had indexed this book, which was already catalogued on commoncontent.org, but not this one, which isn't. So are they simply grabbing everything linked to from commoncontent.org? In general, I don't see how this could really work well, unless they did something like what commoncontent.org gave up trying to do: let people submit listings, and then have a human check whether they're legit.
Find free books.
Another Wikipedian, a developer with Yahoo India, mentioned this on the Wikipedia village pump last night. Being that I handle the full-length music uploads almost single-handedly (you can see my progress here) I went and eagerly tried it out. The result was very disappointing. I searched for about 20 different songs on my wishlist (at the bottom of my user page. Most of the hits were mutopia MIDIs or bizticket e-donkey links --- eg, useless. So I search for the songs + (Ogg OR mp3). The only useful hits were to the Internet Archive and to the MIT free music site, both of which I have thoroughly plundered. So like I said, this was a sizeable letdown.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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
It may be interesting to know that Nutch has been used for this purpose for a while now:
http://search.creativecommons.org/index.jsp. It may also be interesting to know that Yahoo! Labs hosts a Nutch demo search engine with a few hundred million indexed web pages.
Simpy
Mozilla (Firefox) is to Microsoft (IE)as Google is Yahoo.
By pattern I mean waiting for the competition to come up with useful features, then copy them. Take IE7's anticipated new features for example. We've seen them done already, and done right, in Firefox. Just yesterday, Slashdot had an article up about how Yahoo's upping their email space to 1 GB, to compete with Gmail. But Gmail will still be better. POP3 access, and ads that are barely noticeable, excellent user interface... the list goes on and on.
My point is that Yahoo needs to make some innovations of its own, rather than duplicating what's already been done. Come back and talk when you've done so.
10100111001
I've often thought that an organized way of providing legal, free content to people would really help such things take off. irate radio is one such example, and although their client and featureset need an overhaul I use and appreciate it. It has the potential to evolve into something that could challenge commercial content distribution methods successfully, although I don't know if that is really their goal.
:-)
Part of the problem with "free" stuff that is truly free is that people don't know about it, assume by default it must be crap, and don't know where to look for it. A search portal like Yahoo, which has an enormous weight of credibility as a "legit" internet entity, could really add some luster to the idea of free, community oriented licenses and copyright. If google did something like this, they could even link to commercial alternatives in the ads section
The thing is, I don't know how you cope with people who would want to poison the well, so to speak - put false identification information on their site, try to trick you into using something and then demanding $$, and all the other tricks that the world's ample supply of scum would think up. There almost needs to be some community "ranking" method, like site moderation, to keep those losers out. But then the incentive to abuse THAT system becomes high. Sigh.
Oh well. It's a nice idea, and may even stand a chance of working reasonably well. We'll just have to see what happens.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Well, you could use the Internet Archive's new Ourmedia site; automagic BitTorrent tracking and distribution and the like is definitely something they've been planning and hope to release in the immediate future.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Some time ago, I've converted one of my sites/projects (and the works it contains) www.verbumvanum.org to the CC, but whatever I search with - verbum vanum, greek, latin, literature, thesises, etc. - nowhere is my site or any of the works to be found. I thought this searchengine would perform better then the one on the CC page itself, but no. I wonder how much they actually spidered the Net for it, and how much it's just a take-over of the not-to-good-working database of the CC?
Guess they still have a lot of automated indexing to do, or there is a bug somewhere...
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Your photos are listed with a disallow entry in your site's robots.txt.
Yahoo and Google almost certainly (I am over 99% sure of this) respect robots.txt
Also, something called NPBot is told to avoid your whole domain.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
This is not unconventional copyright arrangements, it is unconventional licensing arrangements.
The copyright is just the same as everyone else's copyright. Nothing unconventional to see here. Move along.
What is, perhaps, unconventional is how the works are licensed.
Perhaps just as unconventional is slashdot, where in this thread alone, we will probably see both of the non-words "copywrite" and "copywritten" before the end of the day.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Look for the CC logo, sometimes embedded inside some comments... (Beta indeed)
As for the copyright notice, CC works usually have one. Only the license grants you more rights.
Most CC licenses are quite different from "public domain".
This might have something to do with Yahoo buying Flickr. Flickr is a photolog site that uses creative commons for its users who want to license their pictures (It's quite a good site, I use it myself). Yahoo is now hosting a bunch of creative commons licensed pictures that they'd like to draw attention to.
Why wait? An active torrent tracker requires very little resources or bandwidth, and a well-coded page could even dynamically serve torrents with multiple redundant trackers, to distribute the load even more. The directory could be run in a wiki style, where initial seeders can describe the content they are adding to the network, and others can expand on that as Wikis go. All of this could easily be run on a couple small to mid range servers...no need for Google or Yahoo or some other potentially evil corporation to grab it. This is certainly community attainable. Why don't you pick up the ball? :)
Stasis is death. Embrace change.