The just-announced Eldred defeat has knocked the “Content is Crap” discussion off the top of the page at many a blog. Although I’m a little late to the party, here are some comments on Arnold Kling’s essay.

For those who may have missed it, Arnold said this:

Creative Commons is based on a naive ideology that believes that raw content is gold, which then gets stolen by the evil media companies. In reality, the economics of content are that most of the value-added comes from the filtering process, not the creation process. If you want to overthrow incumbent publishers with Internet-based alternatives, you are better off starting from the assumption that Content is Crap.

and this

I see Creative Commons as a form of 1960's protest theater, not as something that solves a real economic problem.

Later on Bottom Line, he added this:

I don't think that current copyright law is an important factor limiting the growth of culture. The point of my raw sewage metaphor is that the value of content is not constrained by its terms of use, but by the fact that most of it is worthless. My point is that alternative copyright rules do nothing to fix this problem. The challenge in media today is not how to enable the average author's work to be used in more flexible or creative ways. The challenge is in filtering the average author's work so that it is exposed to interested consumers without wasting everyone else's time.

Much discussion has ensued, which you can read here and here. At Copyfight, Donna Wentworth quoted Seth Finkelstein as “hitting the nail on the head” with this comment:

Umm, which "economic problem" [is Creative Commons trying to solve]? It seems to me that Creative Commons is about proving that the optimal setting for creativity is not infinite copyright. That's a social problem, not an economic one."

I’m with Donna – Seth’s is the hammer comment. The reason: Arnold is dissing Creative Commons because it doesn’t solve an economic problem there’s no evidence it was ever intended to solve.

Assume that Z is a creator of words and images. As a creator, Z essentially has three relationships to copyright. Picture these scenarios: 1) Z may wish to reference someone else’s words or images in a set of words or images that Z is creating.  2) Z may wish to make her own words or images public. 3) Someone else may wish to make Z’s words and images public in a way Z has not instigated herself.

Having one kind of copyright means that making words and images public is essentially an all-or-nothing proposition – either Z sells her work through a publisher who will hold all rights, or makes her work available for free without even the guarantee of attribution. In contrast, Creative Commons offers 11 different licenses, so creators may offer “some of your rights to any taker, and only on certain conditions.”

So Arnold’s right – Creative Commons essentially does nothing to resolve the economic problem of unfiltered content. But Seth’s right as well – this is not an economic problem, but perhaps a societal one.

I see Creative Commons as a way to solve copyright as it presents economic problems for individual creators, but not necessarily as it presents an Economic Problem for our society as a whole (except in the sense that individual solutions in the aggregate have the potential to effect positive societal change). Creative Commons solves individual economic problems by offering creators ways to make their work public for all the various individual reasons why a creator would find that economically attractive to do. The point is that many of those reasons have nothing to do with straight pay-for-words-and-images transactions.

Creative Commons also solves the creator’s problem of being able to use source material as reference/point of departure without undue financial burden (I’ve been talking about words and images, but this issue also addresses open-source software).

There is an entire creative universe out there operating almost completely under the radar screens of Big Book Publishers, Radio Companies, Record Companies, etc. The denizens of this Under-the-Radar universe are not well-served by the DMCA. Perhaps none of us is, but the potential for Creative Commons to facilitate a marketplace for the Under-the-Radar universe of word and image creators has great value to us as a society.

At the very least, the Creative Commons experiment makes it possible to model different uses of copyright enough so that we all might begin to figure out better business models for filtering/publishing/selling creative works.