I use CC for my personal work because this blog isn’t the way I make money. I make money by speaking and by getting academic appointments, both of which directly relate to whether my ideas are discussed and gaining currency. It’s my sense that, by making the texts I write here reproducible, with attribution, they’ll reach a wider audience and raise my profile. For me, personally, it’s a tactic to increase market share more than a statement of communitarian belief. The situation with Global Voices is a bit more complicated, but my support of CC in that context has to do with the intent of the project – to bring more voices into mainstream media. In that sense, CC lowers a barrier to inclusion that conventional copyright puts in place. That said, we’re working closely with media organizations to sell GV’s work – we’re not renouncing financial motivations, just not having them hinge on copyright.

Haven’t written on the Iranian protests yet, but the crawlers are generating data – I’ve got crawlers collecting data on “Tehran” and on “#IranianElection” and “#IranElection”. Working with some GV friends to get appropriate terms in Farsi as well.

As for the China critique – revisionism? Really? My colleagues, who’ve looked at the tool, think it’s so badly put together that its use won’t be mandated. Reporting that opinion is hardly an endorsement of their censorship strategy.

Hyde (and you) make an awfully broad claim about “ideas”, with a refusal to acknowledge that there are all kinds of ideas with all kinds of purposes, and it’s ok to copyright and patent some of them to sustain the idea-generator.

Property value is inherent, and in a free marketplace finds its value when sold, and not only in its use — that’s a very narrow and socialist utilitarian view of property.

There’s really only so far you can force this metaphor of a place where people grazed their cattle because they needed cattle to make a living and survive — and the eternally copyable Internet with its requirements of paid servers and paid broadband and a mixture of paid and unpaid programmers, and then a vast swarm of users claiming to use the hardware and software products for free. It’s a very different dynamic when at one level there isn’t any scarcity at all, with digital content being endlessly copyable, but at another level, there very much is scarcity, as maintenance of the big copy machine needs servers, electricity, staff, etc.

Social media generally doesn’t monetarize itself, even as it destroys the old media that had moneterized itself, and there isn’t yet a widely viable way for people other than self-appointed web 2.0 and a handful of bloggers and Second Life content creators, perhaps, to make money off the Internet qua Internet in this iteration. The next iteration simply must provide a way for everybody not only to copy and learn but to earn a living usefully, and not in thrall to Internet oligarchs like Google which runs a system a lot like serfdom with quit-renters working for their Ad Sense pennies.

The commons has traditionally been a place to *exchange* ideas, but I think it’s really stretching it to say that it is a place that traditionally, ideas were “not treated as private property, as they often are today”. This really seems like an anachronism. Could you cite an example from history when people made inventions and carried them to public commons and gave them away? The notions of commons based on literal commons and on literal speech and such took place in a very different setting without copying except by dint of labour and machines costing money and seeking compensation.

History has been about people working alone or in groups and seeking patents, so it seems to me you are overlying a modern notion of what you want the “Creative Commons” to be, based on a utopian ideology, and not any actual reading of history.

It’s also really an interpolation into history to say that the idea that the “Tragedy of the Commons” was inspired by some felt need to argue the concept of private property against communism. That’s rather fanciful, but even if true, implies that there’s actually something good about communism that was merely “misunderstood” or “inexpertly applied” and something evil about private property that needs to be flogged now as a concept.

But the Tragedy of the Commons, historically situated and its recent meaning, was about scarcity of resources and difficulties in allotting them fairly for any society more than it is about “communism” or some “Red Scare”. If people historically solved the problem of the Tragedy of the Commons by fencing off their parcels, that ought to tell you something about invoking communism as a solution to scarcity and distribution problems — people don’t opt for that solution under natural real-life conditions.

In fact, the Creative Commons, which I’m more than happy to call Creative Communism, is about getting people to decouple their intellectual property from commerce and working for free and giving away property for free, with nothing but those who sell ads against the content with enough traffic able to gain a thing from it. It’s about shaking loose their connection to claims to copyright and/or patents to tether them to commerce — and the need to get paid — and trying to substitute for that real and legitimate need a shill about getting credit and contributing to some mythical planetary commons where everyone is going to exchange content freely and happily for ever, “all watched over by machines of loving grace”.

I’ve been running a poll about real attitudes and use of Creative Commons, which CC itself never does, and I’ve also written several blog posts debunking the cult around CC and its myths. The poll so far which is on a blog already skewed with readers very much *pro* CC lets us know that a significant number of people refuse to use CC because they don’t feel it is necessary to protect copyright and they don’t need it, or they want to get paid for their content, and CC doesn’t help them do that. The people who can claim they make an income by giving it all away on CC (like the Doctorows of the world) have to be surveyed further to find out *if they make a living wage* doing that.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/04/further-on-creative-communism.html

Artists and designers and people providing all kinds of IP on the Internet need to get paid. Why can’t they? The tragedy of the Creative Commons is that it did not design a license — due to its founders’ ideological hobbles — to say to a viewer “Pay me and then you can have a copy”. There was no reason why micropayment systems could have sprung up along with the idea of digital content distribution, and be no different than ebay’s immediate establishment of a payments system to sell real content.

I really think your historical notions of antecedents in some idyllic past of “sharing” are a modern overlay and a contrived backdating to try to justify your current pastoralism about the web.

Web 2.0 is a Soviet collective farm, Ethan — We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us” — except for Google, which sucks all the value there is to be had out of its ad agency function, and a handful of IT consultants and widgeteers.

P.S. The reason I came to your blog was to see if you would be telling us that the Iranians twittering about the elections were all fake, etc. as you did with Moldova. But I see you aren’t even writing about Iran. And you are engaged in revisionism about the Chinese filtering software by trying to make the issue about how “the software doesn’t work anyway, kids, so don’t worry” when it is the intent behind the software that you have to address. The Chinese are very good at making software work for this purpose, and are hired by other countries like Turkmenistan.

I feel better now. Thanks. (I should write sometime when i really learn something, not just when I’m having heartburn.)

DB