{these guys(creative commons) did, after a fair amount of work, this. which, among other stimuli, caused this guy(Dan Gillmor) to say this. that, in turn, caused this guy, possibly named Arnold Kling, to say this, about both Gillmor and Creative Commons:
While there are many Net-heads who share Dan Gillmor's enthusiasm for Creative Commons, I do not. It has little or no significance, because it is based on a strikingly naive 60's-retro ideological view of how content intermediaries function. The Commons enthusiasts believe that content publishers earn their profits by using copyright law to steal content from its creators and charge extortionary prices to consumers.
In contrast, I believe that it is important to recognize that publishers perform a valid economic function of filtering content and effectively distributing and selling it to consumers. Today's media companies deserve plenty of contempt, as I have argued many times - see here or here or here. However, although we can get along without today's publishers, we cannot get along without the function that they perform.
that led in its own turn to this rebuttal by Mr Gillmor. Which is where things stand at this moment (5:00 p.m. Monday 01/13/03).
I would add only that the myopia of most participants in most debates of this nature is so horrifying to me that most of the time it sends me into a fugue state. Gillmor's grace is his humility, and a sense he conveys of being in the midst of overwhelming circumstances in which he has a part to play that may or may not bring huge responsibilities with it, but performing as though it does. so I listen to him. he talks about things I don't understand. tech stuff, and how that interfaces with politics and commerce, stuff like Wifi, I get what it does, a little, more though, it's the opening out of all this, hardware software application dream, potential imagined and real, that concerns me.
the Clovis point is, as I understand it, aside from its nature as weapon and tool, a development in the paleological dating of human settlements in North America. a refinement of spear technology whose benefits were so obvious and whose implementation so basic that it is assumed to have spread like wildfire. again, as I understand it, the presence or absence of the Clovis point in ancient middens is one way of determining how old they are. because the technology was so obviously important. and it was free. it spread like wildfire. because it was good, and it was free.
it's not hard to imagine some grasping bottleneck trying to hold out for more than esteem and high regard locally, more elk skins, more mastodon, especially with the examples we have before us of people who put their own welfare, their right to remuneration, above all else, including the welfare of the world itself.
but it also seems unlikely that people like that had much protection from the victims of their greed, then.
inasmuch as the Creative Commons is a small tentative move in the direction of freedom, but not structureless anarchy, they deserve encouragement and praise, I think. and the unquestioned axiom Mr. Kling refers to, that the media-created 60's were nothing more than a drug-muddled dead-end of idealism and naivete, is something I'd like to see held to closer scrutiny. I was there. it seemed a lot more like a brightly chaotic lunge for the fence to me.}
