verifying the license (Aaron Swartz)

Sam Joseph gaijin at yha.att.ne.jp
Sun Nov 24 18:33:35 EST 2002


cc-metadata-request at lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

>>I realize that digital certificates and what not is a hard problem but 
>>are
>>there any plans to incorporate this in the future?
>>    
>>
>
>Sure, we can get the metadata signed, but how can you tell whether the person who signed it is the actual creator of the work or an impostor? 
>
If you have your public key on your web site that would seem to provide
a reasonable way of checking no?

>How many people are actually going to do the work to make sure? 
>
Well wouldn't the thing to do to be to incorporate the checking process
into search engines that support the CC meta-data.

The signed CC meta-data would include a link to the homepage with your
public-key on it. On pressing a "confirm" button supplied by the search
engine, the signature on the meta-data could be checked against the
public key of the author, as well as some other items such as Author name.

There is the issue that someone might copy the entire license insert
their own link to their homepage with a different public key and re-sign
the metadata, but they'd have to link to a homepage that contained all
the appropriate data, so "evil-doers" :-) might be tracked down more easily.

And perhaps more realistically, the search engine itself could keep
track of whether licenses were appearing for the same work under
different public keys, and even whether the rules of the original
licence were being flouted.

Just thinking out loud ....

CHEERS> SAM




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