Content Is Crap

from the say-that-one-again...? dept

A somewhat bizarre article over at Tech Central Station (which is usually quite good) saying that Larry Lessig's Creative Commons is useless because it's based on some sort of hippy ideology. While you can count me in the camp of folks who aren't convinced that the Creative Commons will ever really catch on, I disagree with almost all of the reasons that this article suggests. He seems to misunderstand the entire point of the Creative Commons, by saying that people are doing it because they think publishers are "stealing" their content from them. Nothing is further from the truth. All that people are doing is making it clear what rights everyone else has when it comes to their own content. It has nothing to do with publishing companies and how they use (or misuse) copyright law. The rest of the article goes on to talk about using Bayesian filters as a mechanism for better sifting through content (and somehow he equates CC license as trying to do the same thing as a Bayesian filter). First off, the CC licenses aren't designed to do anything like that. They're not at all designed to let you determine what's relevant for you. They're just there to let you know what you have permission to do with the content. As for Bayesian filters for sifting through content, I'll believe it when I see it. Yes, I can see it working for spam, but I haven't seen anything that comes remotely close to understaning what I really want to click on.

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