Yahoo and Creative Commons

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

This was mistakenly posted to another list.  My apologies to anyone who
has to delete it a second time.

There have been stirrings all over the Internet today concerning the
recent announcement by Yahoo of a specialized search engine for materials
registered with Creative Commons.  Many of the comments link CC with Open
Access.  I wish to add my two cents (in this not-copyrighted post):

While Creative Commons is a matter of law and reason, it has become caught
up in a quasi-religious fervor that makes it hard to talk about without
voices rising to a shout.  It is therefore probably useless to note that a
Creative Commons license neither gives nor takes any rights to or from the
creator of intellectual property that are not already giveable and
takeable under the Great Satan of copyright law.  What CC does do is make
the commercial (or lack thereof) interests of the holders of intellectual
property more apparent.  CC is thus akin to the creation and promulgation
of industrial standards, which ensures us that any electrical plug can be
stuck into any outlet and the width of the track on the head of a screw
will be so wide and no wider, a matter of great importance to the
manufacturers of screwdrivers.  The rhetoric surrounding CC is
Jeffersonian, but the program itself is Hamiltonian.

Yahoo! wades into this religious controversy with all the cunning of a
shrewd marketer, for which advocates of free enterprise will be pleased.  
It is of no consequence that one can go to any search engine--Google, for
instance--and add the terms "creative commons" to the search, thereby
achieving precisely the result that the specialized CC search on Yahoo!
aims or claims to achieve.  My hat is off to the business team at Yahoo!  
I look forward to specialized search tools for Catholics, Sikhs, Seventh
Day Adventists, and perhaps, with a gesture toward Richard Dawkins,
Brights.  No self-organizing social entity should be without its own
metatag.  Perhaps such tags can be trademarked and licensed for a fee,
under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

Observers of the library community will note that this is a volley in the
argument about metatags.  Are they useful in a world of free-text
searching a la Google, or do the algorithms of search engines render
metatags irrelevant?  One would have thought that the world was leaning
away from metatagging, with all the consequent reductions in the role of
librarians, who continue to spend $2 to catalogue and process information
for every $1 spent on acquiring it.  What the marketers at Yahoo! (whose
name of course derives from the uncouth louts in Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels) perceive, on the other hand, is that the world
proceeds on the basis of faith and tribal affiliation.  The future of
metatagging and librarianship is thus tied to the ability of a commercial
entity to achieve a return on capital.

-- 
Joe Esposito