Yahoo Adds Search for Creative Commons Content

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.

Yahoo is good?

Yahoo did something good? hm.

Re:Yahoo is good?

Yep. Much as slashdot will deny it, yahoo is actually getting to be better than google these days.

Definitely Beta

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.

That's interesting...

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.

Lessig's book

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.

In other news...

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

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.

Blogs?

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?

Ahem... [wikipedia.org]

How do they decide what to index?

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

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?

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?

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...

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

Waiting for Yahoo or Google to provide the content

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.

What about ...

GFDL and DSL content? Its a great idea iff its a precursor for a broader free content search. Perhaps I am being too optimistic. Would be nice though ...

Nutch powered CC search

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

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.

That would ROCK, if done properly

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.

Phukkin A

Amazing -- they one-upped Google on the coolness factor. Good for them! Bookmarked.

Anything to do with flickr?

Yahoo recently bought [slashdot.org] flickr to use their technology for photo stuff.

flickr [flickr.com] ties in heavily with Creative Commons licenses (a good place to look if you want CC licensed photos)

I'm wondering if the timing is just coincidence.

wow

Yahoo beats google to something cool.. what's next?

doesn't seem to work all that well...

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?

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.

How can it tell?

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?

CC question

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?

Flickr

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.

G ogle drops the ball?

The question is why didn't Google think of this first? When you can install an extension that displays Creative Commons info into Mozilla/Firefox, wouldn't the next logical step be to search specifically for Creative Commons content. Local, Apple, BSD Unix, Linux, Microsoft, even Scholar and Public Service searches. Google is the king of topic-specific searching. What happened?