discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Lucas Gonze <lgonze AT panix.com>]

I do similar referrer magic with http://webjay.org/playthispage.  It's a 
kludge but works pretty well.

However, I think that linking to a CC license is an assertion by the 
linker, and fudging around with the end result might weaken the assertion. 

- Lucas

Mike Linksvayer wrote:

> Pretend that http://example.com has a link to
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
>
> When someone clicks on that link, typically the user agent sends
> http://example.com as the referrer.  The CC server could get the content
> at the referrer and alter deed presentation based on that content
> (including metadata found there), e.g., if it looks like primarily audio
> content, the deed could be tweaked accordingly -- I had to hardcode one
> such tweak, see
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed-music -- among
> many other possibilities, I want to avoid ever creating a custom deed
> url like that again.
>
> Is there something horribly wrong with the idea of getting the referrer
> url?  With potentially changing the deed based on content found there?
>  



> The obvious downside is that a slow/dead host pointed at by the referrer
> will slow down deed rendering, but I don't know if that is a serious
> issue--if slow, it's "just" a continuation of an already bad user
> experience, as the user's browser already presumably slowly retrieved
> the content that links to a CC deed, while the dead host case is
> unlikely, as the user's browser never got the page linking to the deed
> in the first place.
>
> I'm sure someone will say this is a vector for denial of service
> attacks, but then wouldn't directly attacking the linking page be more
> effective?  The CC server will of course have to do a little caching and
> throttling.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>