[Foundation-l] discussion about banning external hotlinking

[Simetrical]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> One click vs.. I don't agree that it's at all comparable

Well, in neither case is it obvious that the credits are even
available at all, and I think that's the important similarity.  But
that's neither here nor there.  If we're okay with the image merely
linking to the image page on Wikipedia, it should be okay for hotlinks
too.

(Why are the links not something simple anyway, again, like
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/thumb/Image:ImageName.png/800x600>?
That would *almost* allow replacing "thumb" with "wiki" to get the
image page . . . there's no reason to have it retrieve directly from
the filesystem, when everything is cached by Squid anyway.)

> But see in the hotlinking case we're an active participant.  It
> doesn't continue without our help.

You mean, it doesn't continue if we decide to actively (possibly at a
hit to performance) go out of our way to try to filter out those
images.  And even then it still probably continues, just people have
to reupload it somewhere -- without *any* ability for the interested
viewer to track where it's from, tech-savvy or not.

> Besides, as I pointed out.. there
> are clear actions which we can take to mitigate the harm: good linking
> instructions, offering extensions to popular blogging platforms, and
> preserving/filling out image metadata.

That I agree with.  :)

> Cool. 'nuff.  You might want to hunt down mangus little JS example. I
> can't find it at the moment, but the user interface was pretty
> reasonable as I recall.

Is there any problem with something that just looks like Flickr?
Actually, I don't see any interface for this on Flickr -- say
ImageShack, then?

Where should the instructions be put, right under the image?

Do we have agreement that we actually want this?  It's rather a big
leap in the opposite direction from the OP.  :)