after all that, I gave into the tem­pa­tion and posted away myself. since nobody’s going to read it (I’m like #123124 on the list of posters), I’m putting it here too, where lots and lots and lots of people will read it.

for ref­er­ence, the article that gen­er­ated all the heat was this blog post knocking Xeni Jardin’s posting of the “cre­ative com­mies” copy­left flag I blogged about ear­lier.

ok, here’s what I said:

• first, the cre­ative com­mies meme was done in fun and on the spur of the moment, obvi­ously. if we start stressing about being spon­ta­neous and fun, even if it is in a public place like a blog, then we will all get bored and go home. copy­right reform will not ben­efit. or worse, we will all be boring. no amount of copy­right reform is worth that.

  sec­ondly, while I greatly appre­ciate Charlie Stross’s com­ments on the neces­sity for some min­imal level of pro­fes­sion­alism in the PR approach of copy­right reformists, I think he is ignoring or at least under­val­ueing the pos­si­bility that we will not suc­ceed by out-​​suiting the suited on the suits-​​only stage. this is a move­ment that stands to gain a lot by informal, friend to friend, col­league to col­league growth. pos­sibly, by the time we are debating it on stage, the debates will only be a for­mality, given that we will have the weight of public opinion and behav­iour at our backs regard­less. perhaps.

  third, the fact that Rush Limbaugh points to this meme as evi­dence of our lit­eral com­mu­nism doesn’t greatly worry me. I have no hope of con­verting his audience.

  fourth (wow, that’s a lot), if enough main­stream folk point in Rush’s manner, then the cumu­la­tive effect might be to grad­u­ally shift those folks out of the main­stream in the opinion of the public, as attacking our social ben­efit propo­si­tion by pointing at our tshirts doesn’t look so hot as a debating strategy to anyone with sense. I am assuming the public has sense, and I’m not sure that I’m wrong.