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Yahoo Adds Search for Creative Commons Content

Posted by Zonk on Thu Mar 24, 2005 11:48 AM
from the attribution-only dept.
The Internet Patents
BlakeCaldwell writes "Yahoo has added the ability to search specifically for content with unconventional copyright arrangements. The search tool was produced in order to help promote Creative Commons' efforts to advocate the use of nontraditional copyright arrangements between digital content developers and people interested in licensing those individuals' work. The group said that most of the content available through the Yahoo search can be licensed for free under required attribution or noncommercial usage guidelines." Commentary on Lawrence Lessig's Blog.
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  • Yahoo did something good? hm.
    • I don't know about that...

      look here [yahoo.com] and notice there's no option to " search specifically for content with unconventional copyright arrangements."
      That link is what you get when you select ADVANCED options on the yahoo search. How many people even BOTHER to do that?

      I mean, the way to yahoo is www.yahoo.com, and a scant few will use the advanced search feature. Think about likely it is for people to end up using "http://search.yahoo.com/cc" instead of "www.yahoo.com"

      That's like Microsfot saying the have co
      • I know I'll use it at times. Sure, 95% of users will never know about it or utilize it. But of the small fraction of users who are content creators, I imagine a sizable number of them will utilize it.

        And more importantly, the first thing that went through my mind upon seeing this was that I now have a much stronger incentive to get some of my better pictures posted and accessible. The reason for that is that I would allow my stuff to be used in this manner, but never bothered to put it out there, because w

    • Re:Yahoo is good? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by m50d (797211) on Thursday March 24 2005, @12:25PM (#12036827) Homepage Journal
      Yep. Much as slashdot will deny it, yahoo is actually getting to be better than google these days.
    • If this works at all, which it [tinyurl.com] does [palaeos.com]... it's DoublePlus Good.

      As a website operator, I've been looking for this type of thing for a long time. Google'n "GNU FDL" doesn't get me the right results and I don't like raping Wikipedia, which I have done and will continue to do.

      I'm always looking for free content that I can edit, improve upon or parody. I wish this could be extended to GPL code and GNU FDL documents as well.

      What? It's like two more radio buttons right?

  • Definitely Beta (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nos. (179609) <andrewNO@SPAMthekerrs.ca> on Thursday March 24 2005, @11:52AM (#12036501) Homepage
    I tried a few different searches on a range of topics and on pretty much every page there was no notice of non-traditional license and most had a copyright notice at the bottom.
    • Look for the CC logo, sometimes embedded inside some comments... (Beta indeed)

      As for the copyright notice, CC works usually have one. Only the license grants you more rights.
      Most CC licenses are quite different from "public domain".
    • I think you may have overlooked one of the most common ways of labelling a work as Creative Commons licensed, which is using RDF and strange tags like <License> and <permits&gt. Check out the HTML source of a document if you don't have a fancy browser that can interpret that.

  • That's interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by FooAtWFU (699187) on Thursday March 24 2005, @11:52AM (#12036505) Homepage
    That's interesting, but will they be adding stuff from OurMedia [ourmedia.org] (now recovered from its first Slashdotting and on much-beefier-servers) and the Wikimedia Commons [wikimedia.org] and the like?

    The former, I know, has explicit methods to label content as Creative Commons or other types of license.

  • He advertises it on his blog page, but does anyone know where I can download it?

    I tried to find it on the Yahoo! CC search page, but just found his blog page.
  • Microsoft announced today that they are adding a new feature to MSN search, which allows you to restrict the search results to information and works with severe license restrictions. A Microsoft spokesman said, "We believe that when you look at Total Cost of Ownership, you will find that our heavily restricted content provides a better value than works that are in the public domain. After all, Moby Dick is only free if your time is worth nothing." A followup statement attributed the confusing nature of the previous statement to the spokesman's overly tight necktie.

  • Why Google can't do this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by afree87 (102803) on Thursday March 24 2005, @11:58AM (#12036567) Homepage Journal
    Google's "pages that link to this page" (link:) algorithm has been broken for quite a while, especially in the case of Creative Commons licenses. It only shows a fraction of the pages linking. I believe this has something to do with the PageRank code. In any case, it makes their Creative Commons searches very small.

    On the other hand, if anyone at Google found it worth their time, they could start taking note of RDF data in the page to mark it as Creative Commons.
  • In my experience, I've hardly ever seen anything with a "Creative Commons" logo that wasn't a blog. As if anyone would care to use a sample of the countless bundles of crap that are blogs. *yawn*

    • Re:Blogs? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bcrowell (177657)
      In my experience, I've hardly ever seen anything with a "Creative Commons" logo that wasn't a blog.
      See my sig for a catalog that includes a lot of more substantial examples.

    • Re:Blogs? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Daengbo (523424)
      I'm in the process of putting various EFL teaching materials and help for students on my website, all of which are CC copyrighted (attribution/share-alike).

    • Re:Blogs? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Raul654 (453029) on Thursday March 24 2005, @12:06PM (#12036650) Homepage
      Ahem... [wikipedia.org]
    • What about Stock XChange [www.sxc.hu]?

      Free (stock) photography. A lot of is just OK, some of it is not really stock photography, but the site is one of those can't live without them sites. Especially considering the cost of paying for Corbis, etc.

      Not even a Creative Commons License... Just completely free*. I almost am shamed to provide the link as their servers are constantly overloaded.

      * As in beer-speech. Some have their worked marked "for non-commercial use only" but sending a friendly email of "Can I have this o
    • How about Cory Doctorow's exellent novelDown and Out in the Magic Kingdom [craphound.com], which is currently one of the finalists for this year's Nebula Award for Best Novel?

      It would be great if it won the Nebula Award, then even more people would get some exposure to the Creative Commons.
    • <on-topic reply and semi-shameless plug>

      All of my creative writing (such as a novel [fallinggrace.com] and a screenplay [fallinggrace.com]) is CC, as well as my legal writing [fallinggrace.com]. I also have some more blog-type entries on my site, which also happen to be CC.

      </on-topic reply and semi-shameless plug>

      If you don't want blog entries in your results perhaps you could use "-blog" or similar to try to filter? Alternately, add "short story" or "poem" to try to find the style of content you are looking for.

      There is a not insignificant

  • How do they decide what to index? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bcrowell (177657) on Thursday March 24 2005, @11:59AM (#12036577) Homepage
    This could be very helpful if they can take up the slack after commoncontent.org [commoncontent.org]'s slide into dormancy. (The commoncontent.org site hasn't added any new content since Oct. 8, and I've had one submission in their queue for months now. Apparently they gave up on maintaining the site actively because of people submitting spam links.)

    However, it's not clear to me how they decide what to index. There doesn't seem to be any explanation of that under Yahoo's "Learn more..." link. When I tested the Yahoo index, they had indexed this [lightandmatter.com] book, which was already catalogued on commoncontent.org, but not this [lightandmatter.com] one, which isn't. So are they simply grabbing everything linked to from commoncontent.org? In general, I don't see how this could really work well, unless they did something like what commoncontent.org gave up trying to do: let people submit listings, and then have a human check whether they're legit.

  • I was disappointed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Raul654 (453029) on Thursday March 24 2005, @12:03PM (#12036621) Homepage
    Another Wikipedian, a developer with Yahoo India, mentioned this on the Wikipedia village pump last night. Being that I handle the full-length music uploads almost single-handedly (you can see my progress here [wikipedia.org]) I went and eagerly tried it out. The result was very disappointing. I searched for about 20 different songs on my wishlist (at the bottom of my user page [wikipedia.org]. Most of the hits were mutopia MIDIs or bizticket e-donkey links --- eg, useless. So I search for the songs + (Ogg OR mp3). The only useful hits were to the Internet Archive and to the MIT free music site [mit.edu], both of which I have thoroughly plundered. So like I said, this was a sizeable letdown.

  • Trust? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Valthezeh (870251) on Thursday March 24 2005, @12:05PM (#12036638)
    After doing a few searches, I'm really confused by the results coming up - some are posted on news sites, and other places where my first assumption is definitely not that I can just take the image and go on my way with no worries. Are we just supposed to trust that the search engine *actually* found media we can safely use? Because somehow I don't think that my college will be too happy with me if I try to use that as an excuse when I'm being accused of stealing someone else's intellectual property.

    It still seems that making sure the image is really free for use has to be the responsibility of the person doing the search, and it looks like in some cases this is going to require at least a little bit of extra searching.

    Still a cool idea, and I hope they continue to improve on it.

    • Re:Trust? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MenTaLguY (5483) on Thursday March 24 2005, @01:09PM (#12037301) Homepage

      Are we just supposed to trust that the search engine *actually* found media we can safely use?

      Empthatically no! It's always going to require resonsibility on the part of the person doing the search and using the content.

      This isn't something that can feasibly be enforced through technological means; it's not a technologically tractable problem, and any serious attempts would basically end up being crappy DRM that still didn't work.

      The point of having the machine-readable descriptions and a search engine like this is that it can at least do the hard work of finding candidate works for you to evaluate.

  • My photos are not listed... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My photos [bloodgate.com] are under CC, but not listed in Yahoo. (In fact, most of the search results for "bloodgate" were not relevant at all...)

    Back then, when I choose a license, I tried to submit this to the CC database, but I never got it to recognise my work.

    Now Yahoo! does not list it either, and to submit my site, I have to login to Yahoo! (WTF?).

    images.google.com doesn't have them, either. I think something is wrong with my sitecode :)

    Tels
  • I'd like to see a company like Yahoo or Google pick up the ball and start a Bittorrent tracker service for creative commons content with a centralized directory-style index.
    • Well, you could use the Internet Archive's new Ourmedia [ourmedia.org] site; automagic BitTorrent tracking and distribution and the like is definitely something they've been planning and hope to release in the immediate future.
    • Why wait? An active torrent tracker requires very little resources or bandwidth, and a well-coded page could even dynamically serve torrents with multiple redundant trackers, to distribute the load even more. The directory could be run in a wiki style, where initial seeders can describe the content they are adding to the network, and others can expand on that as Wikis go. All of this could easily be run on a couple small to mid range servers...no need for Google or Yahoo or some other potentially evil co

  • Nutch powered CC search (Score:4, Informative)

    by otisg (92803) on Thursday March 24 2005, @12:12PM (#12036708) Homepage Journal
    It may be interesting to know that Nutch [apache.org] has been used for this purpose for a while now:
    http://search.creativecommons.org/index.jsp [creativecommons.org]. It may also be interesting to know that Yahoo! Labs hosts a Nutch demo search engine with a few hundred million indexed web pages.

  • Seems to be a pattern (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nighthawk127127 (848761) on Thursday March 24 2005, @12:13PM (#12036724) Journal
    Mozilla (Firefox) is to Microsoft (IE)as Google is Yahoo.
    By pattern I mean waiting for the competition to come up with useful features, then copy them. Take IE7's anticipated new features for example. We've seen them done already, and done right, in Firefox. Just yesterday, Slashdot had an article [slashdot.org] up about how Yahoo's upping their email space to 1 GB, to compete with Gmail. But Gmail will still be better. POP3 access, and ads that are barely noticeable, excellent user interface... the list goes on and on.

    My point is that Yahoo needs to make some innovations of its own, rather than duplicating what's already been done. Come back and talk when you've done so.
    • No. This is a prime example of Yahoo doing something innovative, and it's not the only one either. They don't do all the leading edge stuff because they're trying to be reliable. They don't want to be the absolute best for searching, they want to be the only place you ever need to go on the internet.
    • Mozilla (Firefox) is to Microsoft (IE)as Google is Yahoo....
      waiting for the competition to come up with useful features, then copy them

      So where is Google's CC search? I like Google as much as the next guy but lets give credit where credit is due.

  • That would ROCK, if done properly (Score:5, Interesting)

    by starseeker (141897) on Thursday March 24 2005, @12:16PM (#12036745) Homepage
    I've often thought that an organized way of providing legal, free content to people would really help such things take off. irate radio is one such example, and although their client and featureset need an overhaul I use and appreciate it. It has the potential to evolve into something that could challenge commercial content distribution methods successfully, although I don't know if that is really their goal.

    Part of the problem with "free" stuff that is truly free is that people don't know about it, assume by default it must be crap, and don't know where to look for it. A search portal like Yahoo, which has an enormous weight of credibility as a "legit" internet entity, could really add some luster to the idea of free, community oriented licenses and copyright. If google did something like this, they could even link to commercial alternatives in the ads section :-)

    The thing is, I don't know how you cope with people who would want to poison the well, so to speak - put false identification information on their site, try to trick you into using something and then demanding $$, and all the other tricks that the world's ample supply of scum would think up. There almost needs to be some community "ranking" method, like site moderation, to keep those losers out. But then the incentive to abuse THAT system becomes high. Sigh.

    Oh well. It's a nice idea, and may even stand a chance of working reasonably well. We'll just have to see what happens.
    • Part of the problem with "free" stuff that is truly free is that people don't know about it, assume by default it must be crap,

      Unfortunately the vast majority IS crap (although this could be said of professional music as well though possibly to a lesser extent).

      Popularity metrics are one way to try and combat this. It also helps to have an active community or a webmaster who will try and do a bit of filtering.

      I allow anybody to submit to my project but also spend a lot of time scouring the net looking
  • Amazing -- they one-upped Google on the coolness factor. Good for them! Bookmarked.
  • Yahoo beats google to something cool.. what's next?
  • Some time ago, I've converted one of my sites/projects (and the works it contains) www.verbumvanum.org to the CC, but whatever I search with - verbum vanum, greek, latin, literature, thesises, etc. - nowhere is my site or any of the works to be found. I thought this searchengine would perform better then the one on the CC page itself, but no. I wonder how much they actually spidered the Net for it, and how much it's just a take-over of the not-to-good-working database of the CC?

    Guess they still have a lot of automated indexing to do, or there is a bug somewhere...

  • Unconventional Copyright? vs. Licensing? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonym0us Cow Herd (231084) on Thursday March 24 2005, @02:07PM (#12038016)
    This is not unconventional copyright arrangements, it is unconventional licensing arrangements.

    The copyright is just the same as everyone else's copyright. Nothing unconventional to see here. Move along.

    What is, perhaps, unconventional is how the works are licensed.

    Perhaps just as unconventional is slashdot, where in this thread alone, we will probably see both of the non-words "copywrite" and "copywritten" before the end of the day.
  • What "thingy" on each page is leading Yahoo to index the results in this way? More to the point, if I want to license a web page under CC, how do I get the page to signal Yahoo to let it know?
  • My brain has been warped with a few years' exposure to IP ridiculousness. Is it OK for me to take pictures of things like the insides of Disney parks and post them with a CC license? What if the pics include characters or TM'ed items, like the castle they use in their logo? Can I video-record my POV while on a roller coaster and post that? I'll respect the robot voice that tells me still and video photography is not allowed on some of the dark rides, but what about Big Thunder Mountain Railroad?
    • A photograph you take is created by you, and therefore yours to do with as you please. Barring unusual circumstances like the inside of military research facilities and such, the subject matter is irrelevant (bad example, because that wouldn't actually be a trademark issue).

  • Flickr (Score:3, Informative)

    by Bullet-Dodger (630107) on Thursday March 24 2005, @04:06PM (#12039388)
    This might have something to do with Yahoo buying Flickr [slashdot.org]. Flickr is a photolog site that uses creative commons for its users who want to license their pictures (It's quite a good site, I use it myself). Yahoo is now hosting a bunch of creative commons licensed pictures that they'd like to draw attention to.

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