I posted this to Rhizome too: John Dvorak trashes creative commons. It was a big mistake. I’m a proponent of Creative Commons so when I saw the link on Slashdot I figured that it would be good to link to it and get another side of the story.

But the article is so full of ignorant statements and falsehoods that it wasn’t really worth a link. Some examples?

If you are unfamiliar with this thing, be sure to go to the Web site and see if you can figure it out. Creative Commons actually seems to be a dangerous system with almost zero benefits to the public, copyright holders, or those of us who would like a return to a shorter-length copyright law.

What is he? Stupid? It’s not hard to figure out what it’s for. Right now copyright law is very complicated, so Lessig created these licenses to help individuals publish and share without having the need of a lawyer. Simple as that.

This means that others have certain rights to reuse the material under a variety of provisos, mostly as long as the reuse is not for commercial purposes. Why not commercial purposes?

Creative Commons allows you to share your work for commercial purposes. And he knows it too because he writes ‘mostly.’ He’s intentionally trying to misrepresent what CC is about.

I apologize for linking to this garbage. permanent link to this post