Google sez: all your profile are belong to Creative Commons
You might remember that back when Yahoo launched their search for Creative Commons licensed content, it would return anything which linked to a Creative Commons license, whether it was under that license or just talking about the license.
Now Google has launched their own version, with its own peculiar quirk: apparently anything which includes the word “profile” is under a Creative Commons license in their eyes. If you’ve got an explanation, serious or funny, for why they would think I want anyone to be able to republish my personal information from Blogger, and SourceForge, and ORBlogs, and addons.mozilla.org, and TypeKey, and every Manila weblog where I’ve ever commented, I’d love to hear it.
Looks like it’s just buggy. I played around a bit, and found that I can only get one page of results from a search which is supposed to return CC-licensed content; the ”Next 10” link (and the individually-numbered links under the ”Goooogle” at the bottom of the page) returns the next page of a search without the CC constraint.
And FWIW, the first ten results for the actual CC search on ”ringnalda profile” doesn’t return anything from a site of yours, at the moment.
’Cause none of the sites say that you don’t want that?
In all seriousness, though, it doesn’t look like it’s working yet. It’d be nice if you could have a few more fine-grained settings when searching too: for example, what if I want things that I can use with attribution in a commercial work, like Attribution or Attribution-NoDerivs (as opposed to Attribution-NonCommercial or Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial, which can’t be used commercially)?
It’s a nice start, but honestly, this just looks like a Google PR move to hold on to the hipsters who actually use CC licenses.
What Phil U. said. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to search for music that I can use as background tracks in my CC-BY-SA videos. Using music in such a way constitutes a derivative work, and the vast majority of sites that proudly proclaim that they’re part of the Free Culture Free Music Free Love yadda yadda movement are really just releasing music under a variety of restrictive ”shared source” licenses.
And can I just take this opportunity to rant a little about Creative Commons in general? There are something like 11 licenses now, not including subtlely incompatible revisions of each, and not including subtlely incompatible country-specific versions of each. Of those 11, only 2 could even hope to be considered ”open source” (CC-BY and CC-BY-SA). Open source requires the ability to create derivative works, which precludes CC-BY-ND and friends. Open source also requires that you don’t discriminate against fields of endeavour, which precludes ”non-commercial use only” licenses (CC-BY-NC and friends). It is the ultimate irony that Lessig’s Free Culture book is released under a license that prohibits commercial re-use. So much for free culture.
Don’t even get me started about the Music Sampling licenses or the too-clever-by-half Developing Nations license.
Meanwhile, even CC-BY and CC-BY-SA, the only 2 CC licenses that could possibly be considered ”open source”, have technical problems that render them both incompatible with the GPL and incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. And no, the CC 2.5 licenses don’t fix this. The 3.0 licenses might. (Think that doesn’t matter because it’s software? Games ship with music. Applications ship with icons and graphics. Documentation and even software itself can ship with video tutorials. And so on.)
And don’t even get me started about people using the CC licenses for software, something the Creative Commons FAQ explicitly warns not to do. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain to people that even though their script is CC-BY-SA licensed, it’s not compatible with my GPL program, and could they please re-license it so it could actually be useful to the rest of the world.
This all comes from having a movement started by lawyers and pragmatists instead of sociopathic extremists. Say what you want about Richard Stallman, but you need extremists to define the spectrum of debate. Without people who are waaaay out there, the open source community would look a lot like Creative Commons: a smattering of licenses that are slightly less evil than the default, but not actually open or free in any sense of the word that matters.
Great post, Mark. Have you ever considered writing a blog? ;)
I’m always curious about whether people who reply to Mark’s comments with that (as someone does just about every time and place that I see him comment) actually want less of him, or more. Maybe it’s just me projecting, but if I had said ”that’s it, I no long have a weblog” without meaning ”, and I will never comment on one again, either” but my every comment was met with that response, I’d just stop commenting.
Oh, and to the Mark-stalker who left a comment that appeared here for a moment: I might have left your comment as being instructive, if not informative, except for the name you used, which made you look too grasping. Anyone who wants to find a Mark-stalking weblog can pretty much guess where it would be, you don’t need to advertise here.
I like his writing; that’s all. Didn’t realize that he got that everywhere, if I did I wouln’t have posted that. Sorry.
No biggie: I’m a crabby old man anymore, and Mark’s perfectly capable of defending himself if he feels the need.
When you say that, I imagine yours and Mark’s heads superimposed on Jack Lemmon’s and Walter Matthau’s bodies.
Are you certain you’re looking at the right thing? That query has only one extra parameter, as_qdr=all, but creative commons search uses as_rights=([cc_licenses]), and the following query returns a whole lot less results: ringnalda profile
That’s the ”can be freely modified, adapted or built upon” and I was doing ”allow some form of reuse.” I was guessing that they were cloning Yahoo’s two choices, ”licensed” and ”licensed for commercial use,” and that ”allow some form” meant ”include by-nc” but apparently not. They appear to be fairly good at identifying actually licensed things by license if you hack at the
as_rights, but the ”allow some form of reuse” seems to know about some sort of licensing that involves the word profile.I’ve now checked and double checked.
”aren’t filtered by license” - 72,800 results (same as the query you posted)
”allow some forms of re-use” - 17,500 results
”can be freely modified, adapted or built upon” - 35 results
I’m pretty sure that the query that you linked to was incorrect somehow. The two queries that restricted the result-set based on rights granted seem to be producing reasonable results.
Ah, looks like somebody gave it a little loving Monday: while before ”allow some forms” wasn’t displaying a radio button below the search input, now it does, and it seems to have added some things to the querystring that make it actually work.
For the first page only, but who (after setting their prefs for 100 results per page) ever goes past the first page of results anyway?
”Say what you want about Richard Stallman, but you need extremists to define the spectrum of debate.”
Yes, you need Malcolm, but you need Martin, too. A small business’s Mr. Safe *might* consider something as attractive as the CC homepage when choosing licenses for his company’s work. He’s extremely unlikely to dig into some usenet historical archive to figure out what the hell rms was advocating.
Who do we hate more than the person that disagrees with us 100%? The person who agrees with us 99%.