So everyone is talking about (most spewing idealism out of their asses, and in their zeal confusing shit for gold) Yahoo!'s new Creative Commons search engine, which in theory should return things that you can copy and use for your own projects with a variety of free-ish licenses.
 Match #1 for “tattoo” I know the owner of this tattoo (and it's on BME also), and I know that he doesn't like his image being copied like this. Not only that, but you can see that his email address has been blacked out of the photo. Additionally, this instance was stolen not just from the source, but from an E/N site that had previously stolen it and now claims their own copyright on it — you can see their logo bottom center. Yeah, “Creative Commons license”. Whatever. |
I call “bullshit!”
I did some test searches for terms where I am very familiar with the media on the subject (BME stuff and so on), and ignoring pointless inane blog posts that no one would want to copy in the first place, a vast percentage of the media returned is copyrighted commercial content and I even found materials stolen from BME and other projects friends (or I) have been involved in!
Somehow I doubt “but Yahoo! told me I could copy it” will fly in court, and I would hope that they'll ammend their license and surrounding notes to reflect their incompetence and inaccuracy soon.
But I'd be surprised if the people pushing CC so hard really care about ripping off pornographers and deviants, and will do little to correct these rampant problems… Hell, for all I know Yahoo! and other big corporations playing with CC-stuff right now are playing a double agent game that will one day destroy these shortsighted crusaders cheerleaders.
Note: To be clear, I suppport Creative Commons licensing, and have released a ton of software, music, video, and images under various free licenses. However, I have a BIG FUCKING PROBLEM with people stealing copyright-controlled media and claiming it's free and then passing it on.
Update from a forum thread…
Me: “They will NEVER be able to build an automated search for copyright free material.”Smart Friend: “Unless every piece of content ever created and ever to be created had metadata inserted with no human intervention. IOW, yer right.”
Me: “Actually, the real reason it can't be done is 95% of the material released as 'free' (under one 'license' or another) is done so FRAUDULENTLY… that is, the person releasing it is claiming it has a different license than it does. Claiming that warez is shareware does not make it so.”
“The only way for this to work is a method of authenticating authors, linking them to their productions, and giving them direct and implicit control, without the ability to separate these elements. Oh wait, that's DRM, and no one likes that either. ;-)“
Meh. A la guns don't kill people, I kill people, one must point out, DRM doesn't sue people, the RIAA sues people… It's always interesting how politically motivated technologists on both sides of the debate will choose one technology and say “it's a tool that can be used for both good and evil, but just a tool” while denouncing something else equally tool-like…
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