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| Friday, January 17, 2003 |
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Toward a blog cosmology 
| | In the interest of equal space (call it affirmative distraction), here are some bonus links from several who sided with the majority of Supremes on Eldred matter: Richard Bennett, Jeff Jarvis and Misanthropyst. And backthanks to Richard (whose cosmos is here) for pointing to the other two. |
Not any more
Because Rome wasn't wrecked in a day
What it isn't
Two more ink guys, flinging pixels
| | Regardless of where you stand on what the gentlemen are saying, ya gotta admit that Lileks outwrites LeCarré. |
Commons assumptions
| | Creative Commons is based on a naive ideology that believes that raw content is gold, which then gets stolen by the evil media companies. In reality, the economics of content are that most of the value-added comes from the filtering process, not the creation process. If you want to overthrow incumbent publishers with Internet-based alternatives, you are better off starting from the assumption that Content is Crap |
| | In reality, the Creative Commons is a progressive technical solution to a simple problem that content creators have had in the face of a publishing/distribution industry unable to expand as rapidly as the creative media available to individuals: it lets the content creator express the preferences relating to how content may be used in machine-readable formats so that those preferences can be enforced later. In an age when it is impractical to send a copy of everything to the Copyright Office in order to gain protection of one's creative work, the Creative Commons is a simple solution to stating what rights we creators claim in our work. And it leads to a content marketplace in which people can sample intelligently and purchase exactly what they want. |
| | Earlier in his piece, Arnold says this: |
| | While there are many Net-heads who share Dan Gillmor's enthusiasm for Creative Commons, I do not. It has little or no significance, because it is based on a strikingly naive 60's-retro ideological view of how content intermediaries function. The Commons enthusiasts believe that content publishers earn their profits by using copyright law to steal content from its creators and charge extortionary prices to consumers. |
| | Let's look a little more closely at some assumptions here. Do Larry Lessig and the crew at Creative Commons really believe that — or, more to the point, do they believe only that? |
| | All the Commons entusiasts I know believe content creators haven't had enough choice about how their work might be used and re-used; and that intermediators haven't had much choice, either. Creative Commons addresses the market's need for choice, for both supply and demand — for first sources and final customers. We can complicate this purpose with politics, but we don't need to. Creative Commons was created by and for the marketplace. It will stand or fall for the plainest possible reasons. |
| | In contrast, I believe that it is important to recognize that publishers perform a valid economic function of filtering content and effectively distributing and selling it to consumers. Today's media companies deserve plenty of contempt, as I have argued many times - see here or here or here . However, although we can get along without today's publishers, we cannot get along without the function that they perform. |
| | I don't think most folks around Creative Commons would disagree with that. Some, like me, don't like the term "consumers," because we think it's a shitty way of saying "customers," but still, it's a generally agreeable statement. The problem here is with Arnold's assumptions about Creative Commons' purposes, which seem no less narrow than the assumptions about publishers Arnold claims to be held by Creative Commons' enthusiasts. |
| | Simply put, Creative Commons' mission is to enrich the public domain. It may be naive to believe that either the supply or the demand sides of the content marketplace gives much of a shit about the public domain (yet); but it's not naive to observe that a fallow public domain may be exactly why both the supply and the demand sides of that marketplace are not especially happy with the way incumbent intermediaries have responded to new conditions there. |
| | Yes, there has been much snot flung in the general direction of the old content companies, whose responses to the presence of the Internet in their lives has generally ranged from hostile to clueless. But Creative Commons isn't about snot-flinging. Its purposes are constructive. If it succeeds, it will enlarge the content business by including a public domain that's well-stocked with useful stuff made even more useful by uncomplicated licensing. What's wrong with that? |
| | I say let's give it every chance we can. |
| | Can you use CC to bring more academic research into the public domain? |
| | The short answer should be yes, but it's a lot more complicated than that, for reasons Arnold explains: |
| | I keep getting hung up on the fact that right now the journals and the NBER have leverage not because of copyright but because they have prestige. No economist can afford to blow off those intermediaries as outlets for his or her research. Doing so would be suicidal. So if you gave researchers a tool to label their work with a CC license that is contrary to the terms and conditions of the incumbent intermediaries, it would not be in their interest to use it. |
| | He says more. Go read it. |
| | More responses (to Eldred) here and here and here. Also more backblog here. |
Blog bigger
It's more threaded than it appears
| | A couple days ago I posted an item by Ivan Hoffman, an intellectual property attorney who found cause for joy in the Supreme Court's decision on Eldred. While some thought I was being a bit unfair to the dude, others were just as creeped out as I was. |
| | Well, it turns out the latter group includes The Head Lemur, who has had his run-ins with Hoffman in the past. Notably here, here, and here. |
| | By the way, The Head Lemur says he's resolved to convert his news site to a blogging system, using Radio. That'll be great. We've needed a real blog out of THL for a long time. |
Free(beer) speech
| | I was walking around a Staples store yesterday afternoon, talking with David Sifry on the cell phone about what a shitty market there is for freelance journalism. It's a topic Paul Boutin brought up in a recent conversation, and which has been echoed by other journalistic Ronin I know. David and I were wondering out loud about the role of blogs in this development when a line popped into my head: Blogs are commodifying journalism. |
| | By blogging for free, I wondered, am I undercutting the market for my own work? |
| | If this is an insight (and I'm not sure it is), it's not an actionable one. The market is clearly still there. |
| | As Tom Matrullo points out, Francisco Toro isn't so lucky. He recently decided he'd rather blog Caracas Chronicles, fighting for his causes and reporting with honesty and passion, than write in the voice of a detached observer as a stringer for the New York Times. |
| | The beat goes on. And sometimes off. |
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