Andrew Orlowski Answers Mail on Creative Commons

chronicon writes "Andrew Orlowski takes another swipe at Creative Commons licensing with a look through the mailbag of responses he received from a previous diatribe on the subject. It's obvious to Mr. Orlowski that creativity is 'all about the benjamins.' Yet one interesting point he throws out has me pondering, is a Creative Commons License permanently irrevocable once it's put out there?"

Comments

CC will facilitate projects that were unthinkable

[SilentReallySilentUs]

We recently created a website for collaboration in creative writing - Collaze that uses cc licence. We wanted the contributors to write freely for the public domain without losing the rights to commercially utilize their work later. CC seemed to be custom made for this purpose. So, tomorrow if some entity wants to commercialize the collaborative work, it can do so provided it has the permission of the contributors. Writers can agree and give thier permission to the publisher with or without taking royalty - this depends totally on the writer. I think this is just the beginning. CC will be great for a variety of collaborative work in the future.

Groklaw and Wikipedia are both major works

[Generalisimo Zang]

www.groklaw.net (Groklaw)

It is a VERY major work, and it's under the Creative Commons liscense.

en.wikipedia.org (Wikipedia)

It is also a VERY major work, and is also under the Creative Commons liscense.

So.. um, you're not only a bad bad AC, but you're also a wrong, wrong AC :P

Andrew O is not a troll, but..

[christian.einfeldt]

...he does like complex solutions and is suspicious of simple, elegant solutions. He also likes getting more readers for El Reg. He is a business guy, ultimately, and his biz is bringing eyeballs to El Reg.

Andrew and I both live in SF. I met him for lunch one day at a pasta restaurant on Kearny between Bush and Pine. We talked about a film I'm producing, the Digital Tipping Point, which is a film about the free open source software's part in the cultural benefits of bringing more minds on line. My point was that bringing more minds on line means, more noise, but more quality creativity, too.
In that discussion, he panned both Lessig and Clayton Christensen, both of whom are influential in the upcoming DTP film. He doesn't like what he views as "economic determinism." He thought that the cc relies too heavily on the belief that more access to technology will create more art works of genuine value. And he thought that Harvard Biz Prof Clayton Christensen's work was too simplistic and a form of economic determinism. He actually became quite peeved at Christensen's line of thinking during our discussion. He kept insisting that both Christensen and Lessig are pushing simplistic ideas, and I kept thinking to myself that he had not spent enough time trying to understand Christensen and Lessig, and was dismissing them merely because they both are popular now.

I also kept thinking to myself that Andrew values complex ideas, and I think that he believes that as a journalist, he needs to very visibly display his independence of thought for fear of being labeled a party-line thinker.

Ultimately, it is there that Andrew makes his greatest mistake, IMHO. He's so eager to display his independence of thought that he sometimes will have a knee-jerk reaction against popular ideas, such as the cc or Christensen's theory of disruptive technologies.

So no, Andrew was not trolling with his two stories on the cc. That was the real Andrew O, IMHO. I like Andrew's writing a great deal. I think that he's often right on target, and quite funny. I also think that he is overly concerned about appearing to be an independent thinker.

So Andrew, please relax. You often write great stuff, but this rant about the cc is not one of your best pieces. Please let it drop and move on to something else.

Christian Einfeldt