Worst. Article. Ever.

This is perhaps the worst researched column that I have ever read. It is so wrong that it is difficult to choose from many of the statements. Here are some choice pickings:

First, Creative Commons is similar to a license.

No, it IS a licence. A set of licences to be more precise.

You sign up with the group and post a message saying that your material is protected or covered by Creative Commons. 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?

I am guessing that he did not research at all, and did not discover that there is actually a licence that allows commercial uses.

In fact, the suggestion is dangerous, because if someone were sued by the Creative Commons folks over normal fair use and Creative Commons won the suit, then we’d all pay the price, as fair use would be eroded further.

Creative Commons is not a party to the licence.

There’s another thing that bugs me about Creative Commons. When you see its licenses the wording will say something like “Creative Commons License: Public domain.”

This is not a licence, the CC-PD is a public domain dedication.

That’s what’s bothersome. Creative Commons trying to insert itself as another layer into a system that already protects content developers like me to an extreme. I mean my grandkids will own all my writing exclusively until 75 years after I’m dead, unless I sell all the rights to someone else. What more do I want from copyright?

This is more nonsense that confuses Creative Commons. It fails to understand that CC is just a licensing scheme, and that it is just another way of using copyright. It does not attempt to force Mr. Dvorak to give away his copyright, or choose the licence.

There is now a discussion in Slashdot on the subject. There is also a discussion in PCMag’s forum, where Mr. Dvorak wrote “I do have the problem of writing more than I read — a hazard of the job. That said I’ll read the Lessig tome. Is it online under a Creative Commons license? 🙂 “. I felt really well by providing links to Free Culture and Code v2.