The Creative Commons initiative fulfilled a major ambition last week - but it's taken only days for the dream to turn to crap.
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http://www.theregister.co.uk –
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arito
15 years 12 weeks 22 hours 52 min ago
Not great journalism
The main idea behind this article seems to be to turn the reader against Creative Commons, which can be seen from the choice of words: "crap", "The Creative Commons gang", "dogmatists", "Professor Lawrence Lessig - who designed the wheeze", "Creative Commons' dogmatic wonkery", "Ignore the Commons licences - they may be bogus". The author is clearly trying to use the specific problem brought out in the article as a vehicle to get the reader to accept the author's overall negative attitude against the licensing system.
Ubuntu87
15 years 12 weeks 19 hours 33 min ago
That's right. I totally agree with you.
He is either an extremely poor journalist who was kicked out of college, and he's attacking anything he finds in his way.
Or, he's a paid RIAA(or whatsoever) troll.
J.B.Nicholson-Owens
15 years 12 weeks 14 hours 31 min ago
Orlowski's main point is poor.
Even the main point made in the article is (to use Orlowski's words) "crap".
The point is that Google recently added CC search capability to its image search engine and now "the search engine is now choked with copyright images that have been incorrectly labelled with Creative Commons licences".
All sorts of misattributions happen in all media everyday. How could the WWW be built to not offer the same mistakes to its readers? As for liability, we don't hold books that index other publications liable for the mistakes in those other publications. Why would we blame a search engine for this?
Well before Creative Commons, well before the World Wide Web people have been misattributing copyright. People have been known to claim copyright on works in the public domain and attribute the wrong copyright holder. Whether any of this happens by mistake or on purpose is irrelevant here because search engines don't discriminate what to index based on human intention. The fact that copyright misattribution still happens online is not news.
It's not clear what this has to do with Google either. These misattributions happened with Yahoo's image search which included CC search capability and with Flickr. It's not even clear what this has to do with image searches per se. Perhaps it never occurred to Orlowski that much of the information all search engines index is untrustworthy; people's webpages routinely make claims that aren't true. Apparently the lack of veracity doesn't stop search engines from indexing those webpages nor does it make the search engine a failure.
Orlowski tries to convince us that image searches with licensing information are "crap" by declaring such search engines to be "less than perfect". Imagine how disappointed Orlowski will be with everything else in the world.