Dubbed Creative Commons, this system is some sort of secondary copyright license that, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing but threaten the already tenuous "fair use" provisos of existing copyright law. This is one of the dumbest initiatives ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb.

Dvorak rails on Creative Commons. I think he is intentionally pretending to be more confused about it then he really is, because he wants to make a point. People are unbeleivably dumb when it comes to licenses. I recall dealing with a guy once who had published a software library that said both public domain and all rights reserved on it. His responses to my queries about this were nonsentical.

CC is being promoted as "hip," particularly by BoingBoing and related community. People who would otherwise put their stuff in the public domain are putting CC no commercial use licences on them instead. There is a risk that this will remove more content from the public domain then it will add. Furthermore, you are now starting to see people release source code that is "Creative Commons licensed." Creative Commons doesn't have a license for source code.

Why doesn't Creative Commons has a small commerical use license that lets the work be used commercially as long as the revenue generated by the context of the use is under a certain amount ($50,000)?

Opinion Column by PC Magazine: Creative Commons Humbug