circle.ch :: Link-back URL Regarding The Attribution Option In Licenses

circle.ch weblog by Urs Gehrig

A weblog about libre software, law, technology, politics and the like.

2013-05-11T15:38:07

Academic, Android, Apache, Apple, Art, Best Of, Biotech, Civil Society, Content Management, Cooking, Copyright, Creative Commons, Crosspost, Culture, Database, Deutsch, DRM, Economy, Education, Event, Gadget, General, Geodata, Government, Health, Howto, Humor, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Java, Language, LaTeX, Law, Linux, Media, Moblog, Mozilla, Music, Office, Open Content, Open Source, P2P, PHP, Podcast, Politics, Privacy, Projects, Random Thought, Rant, Science, Search, Social Network, Software, Sport, Talks, Technology, Technology Transfer, Travelling, Weblog, Wiki, Wireless and Mobile, XML

01. February 2004

Link-back URL Regarding The Attribution Option In Licenses
Weblog (wiki) | Intellectual Property (wiki) - urs @ 18:13:40

Mr. Lenz [1] commented the new Creative Commons License draft while pointing to a probably technical challenge regarding the link-back - or back-link; the expression is not yet used consistently around the blogs as I can see - issue. As he states, there is in fact a problem, that most copyrightholders do not get informed when a contract has been closed. So even if I am missing the point; here my proposal:

I was thinking of a link-back URL to the copyrightholder's site which implements a kind of pingback mechanism [2]

Pingback is a method for web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. Typically, web publishing software will automatically inform the relevent parties on behalf of the user, allowing for the possibility of automatically creating links to referring documents.

For example, Alice writes an interesting article on her Web log. Bob then reads this article and comments about it, linking back to Alice's original post. Using pingback, Bob's software can automatically notify Alice that her post has been linked to, and Alice's software can then include this information on her site.

To come around the problem of down-sites, there could be set up an independent foundation that hosts accounts for copyrightholders. The foundation would simply a) an account specific URL to include in the license b) statistics of link-back requests (date, evtl. IP of Remote Host). Eventually, that foundation could or should be hosted by the WIPO.

There have been some thoughts mentioned on the CC weblog earlier but not yet that specific [3]. I think one of the main problems with simple text is, that any RDF or link encapsuled within a blog-post get lost while doing a copy-paste from (X)HTML. Personally I try to give credits to every snippet of text which is used here to comment, to clarify or to explain within a post. So giving proper attribution is not such a problem. But still, that does not - always - solve the discribed issue of informing the copyrightholder...

[1] http://k.lenz.name/LB/archives/000776.html
[2] http://hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback
[3] http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3636