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?<p>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.
I'm glad Marco wrote this piece. I've been a reader of BI but had no idea they employed these kinds of practices.<p>It's incredibly misleading, frankly unethical, to post content like that and pretend like they're publishing with the author's consent. How disappointing.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.