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A Business Insider retrospective

marco.org

142 pointsjakewalker26 comments

Have any of you seen any benefit from using a Creative Commons license for your writing? Has anyone seen anything positive come out of it?

The licenses seem to appeal to our more idealistic side, valuing openness, transparency, and all that great free-as-in-speech stuff that so many hackers love. But if the end result is just a bunch of books and websites where the publisher doesn't have to pay the author then Creative Commons licensing is a pointless exercise.

If the author's primary desire is to spread their thoughts to the most hearers possible, it's not at all pointless, even if other publishers end up profiting from their work "instead" of them.

There are plenty of types of Creative Commons licenses, include several non-commercial variants. If this type of usage pisses off Marco (it probably for me would if I was him), he could easily switch. Its not like using a NonCommercial variant excludes any free commercial usage, just without permission.

Given the permissiveness of fair use laws and the low probability that random bloggers will engage in costly and lengthy lawsuits, I imagine that CC license or not, Marco's stuff would get scraped.

Bzzzzz. Wrong.

7 words, problem solved.

If that doesn't do it, a simple lawyer letter and public shaming certainly will. At least for sites with significant reach and assets/reputation worth losing.

If you go through the posts in the google link from marco's post, many of the scraped summaries are <2 paragraphs, (such as http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-02-02/strategy/3001...) and that would continue to happen regardless of licensure.

The HuffPo which has both significant reach and assets, takes/quotes liberally from other writers and has had mixed responses to public shamings. See http://gawker.com/5820099 . I'm sure other aggregators do similar stuff, Newser comes to mind, although they tend to rewrite and condense, which may be better or worse, depending on the original writer's objectives.

If they write a story that says 'RockyMcNuts says' and a couple of paragraphs of fair use, I'm cool with it.

If they put a whole blog post up on their site with my byline and a linkbait headline, they're getting a lawyer letter, and a lawsuit after about 72 hours.

If you have a license that says "you may reproduce, reblog, and modify my content, but you must provide proper attribution," then that's what people are going to do.

And if you have a license that says they can't, then you can take the steps to stop them. Maybe it's a pain to have to ask people to respect your rights, but with some people that's what you have to do.

If he had no license whatsoever on his site, would that stop business insider? I don't think quoting some copyrighted content from other websites is illegal as long as you link back.

I put CC on virtually all of my Flickr photos. I still get asked permission to reprint them (and once was even paid). It doesn't seem that I get much of an increase in traffic, though....though I've never really tested it by setting the whole collection to non-CC and back. I just don't think Flickr's "interestingness" algorithm would make CC-photos rise higher, as typically the most visually striking photos (also, the photos of models) will not be CC-licensed.

Flickr lets you browse and search CC licensed photos. They also let you do the same for the Commons (public photos, such as those from The Library of Congress) and Getty Images.

I figure if someone's searching for a photo to use on their website, particularly a commercial website, they're not going to browse or search all of Flickr and hope the photos they like are CC licensed — they'll go straight to CC licensed content and pick from those.

Right...I don't know how frequent of a use-case that is. I know I certainly take advantage of it for my non-profit company. But first of all, I think the percentage of people who want to copy a photo as opposed to just looking/commenting on is relatively small. And the small slice of users who do want to copy a photo, a good percentage of them either don't care about honoring CC or feel that they don't need to worry about it (i.e. they want a photo just to use as their wallpaper).

I do this. I use http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/ to search for CC licensed photos.

It's pretty useful when I'm looking for pictures to illustrate a blog post, or to put on my slides for a presentation (I prefer pictures to text).

I'm glad Marco wrote this piece. I've been a reader of BI but had no idea they employed these kinds of practices.

It's incredibly misleading, frankly unethical, to post content like that and pretend like they're publishing with the author's consent. How disappointing.

I feel the same way. That is why after reading Marco's piece I (tried) unsubscribed from BI's daily Newsletter. "Shockingly" enough, when you click on Business Insider's unsubscribe link they send you to an inexistent website/404. Shameful

oh the irony: http://www.businessinsider.com/a-business-insider-retrospect...

Oh wow, that's hilarious!

Don't miss the tiny footnote at the bottom that mentions that they repeatedly spelled his name "Macro" and his website "Macro.org" in correspondence. These BI guys are truly a class act.

I really resent the degree to which companies like AOL, Gawker, and BI punch up their headlines for maximum effect. It's exhausting to skim these headlines in my Google Reader feed, because the emotions they invoke diminish my mental signal-to-noise ratio dramatically.

A tip: unsub from BI's twitter feed and RSS. You'll still get the news, and you'll feel better about it.

It seems that Marco's problem isn't that people are profiting off of his content; if that were the case he'd be using a more restrictive CC license. Rather his problem is that he doesn't like BI's design (nor do I, all of his complaints are spot-on). I wonder how he feels about all of the iPad apps that profit on Wikipedia content. Many of those are well designed; I bet he doesn't have a problem with those.

I think Marco just needs to choose a different CC license. Personally I wouldn't allow BI or HuffPo to do this type of thing to my content.

Anyone else shocked to see HN providing 6x the hits over TechMeme?

No. Techmeme has become very biased lately in what kind of stories they put at the top, and sometimes their top stories stay there even for 24 hours, which gives little reason to come back to the site too often. It feels much slower than HN in the news they bring in.

I have to admit I haven't noticed the bias. What is it?

Not at all. I love Techmeme, but which type of site do you think provides more utility:

a) Tech news aggregator edited by journalists in an up-to-the-minute-fashion.

b) Community hub for entrepreneurs, developers, and designers owned and operated by a startup incubator that can change your fortunes.

Techmeme is a great, but niche site. HN is a force of nature and the front page of a movement to change how business happens.

No. I rarely go to techmeme.com now and mostly click links through Twitter from the Techmeme firehose.

Looks like there's not enough news these days, so tech journalists dissing other tech journalists (Arrington-Swisher or Marco-BI) is what keeps the news sites going.

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