I had a friend ask me a couple of days ago why it’s taking so long to finish the Practical RDF book. I had to laugh (either that or scream) because to write about something such as Siderean Software’s RDF-based search and navigation product, Seamark, required reading over 100 pages of documentation, not to mention installation of the software and other assorted technical activities just to write — effectively — one section covering this very sophisticated commercial product in Chapter 16. And I’m covering at least five other products in that same chapter.
To write about Inkling/SquishQL in Chapter 11 required that I finally download and install Fink (I’ve been lazy), so that I can easily download and install Readline, so that download and install PostgreSQL, so that I can download and install and try out Inkling/SquishQL on my Mac OS X. And SquishQL isn’t even the primary focus of that chapter.
However, I must focus and get this book finished, if for no other reason than to complete the brainwa…urh, education of Dorothea, who is a reviewer for my book (and an excellent one at that).
Must Stop Weblogging.
However, Jonathon has made this a bit difficult by continuing the discussion about copyright and Creative Commons, because, as he puts it, …I am one of only two people in the whole of Blogaria who accept that writers might wish to exert a degree of control over how their work is used and who also feel no obligation to donate their work to the public domain.
I am the other person Jonathon refers to, but I genuinely do not believe we can be the only two people who want to have some control over how our work is used. We can’t possibly be the only two people who believe this. Can we?
As Jonathon, states, this is a topic worth discussing if for no other reason than to see if there are other fishies swimming against the tide of Creative Commons, Public Domain, and an artist’s rights to their own work as compared to the public’s right to use the work as they will. As he writes:
I believe, and I suspect Burningbird does too, that this is a discussion worth pursuing, not so much because she and I happen to share a contrary view but because the intertwined beliefs “copyright is bad” and “Creative Commons is good” have almost instantaneously become an orthodoxy in Blogaria (to wit, the inclusion of support for Creative Commons licenses in the next version of Movable Type). And orthodoxies are the enemy of free, creative thought.
On this issue, there is an orthodoxy within the weblogging kingdom — a mass movement difficult to swim against; and as my last two posts should demonstrate, I am not one for spawning. There must be more subtle nuances to this issue then the black and white pronouncements of “copyright is evil”, “artists wanting to maintain control of their work are stealing from the public domain”, and “creative control suppresses free speech”.
However, I must get myself back to my work and leave this discussion for Jonathon and others — but I sure would like to hear from those others who believe there is no harm in an artist retaining creative control of their work, and that we can be inspired from artists without deriving from them.
(And as I write this, I can feel the push of the stream against me, and see a million fishy eyes headed directly at me…)
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