Creative Comments...

There’s an article by Matt Safford in the latest issue of PC Mag on the subject of Creative Commons that quotes me extensively (read it here) which you might find interesting if you’re in to the whole CopyLeft scene. What the article doesn’t hit upon is something I opined extensively on in the interview itself. Matt had asked me if I felt that using Creative Commons licenses helped our promotional efforts in general. (My comments in the article are a sub-set of my overall rant.) In thinking about it a couple months after the fact, I think that trying to use a Sampling Plus license (or whatever) as a promotional vehicle is just plain silly. The only people that care are about 80 bloggers and internet radio station operators that live on the outskirts of San Francisco.

(Unfortunately, one of those people is Cory Doctorow, and he just won’t shut the fuck up. It makes the rest of us, people that are actually creative instead of just pretending to be so we can get speaking fees, look bad. “Hey, look, my latest terrible novel has been machine-translated in to Farsi backwards, and every third word was replaced with an icon that represents Mickey Mouse. Aren’t I charming?”)

Anyways, I’m not sure what my point is here, but I’m fairly certain I have one. We’re in Phoenix now, and oddly enough, it’s colder here than our mountain home in Oregon. Go figure.