Right now, I’m somewhat jealous of my iTunes friends because they have the iTunes Music Store. If Rhythmbox had a free music store, they’d be jealous of me. :-)

You’re probably aware of this, but if the verify URL is inaccessible (which seems to be the case for one of my files right now, as creativecommons.org seems to be temporarily down), it results in a long wait untill the request times out – the file properties window doesn’t display untill the time out, and it freezes nautilus. Clearly, it would be nicer if the retrieving of license metadata could be done in the background (this would improve the response on people with slower internet connections, or who are querying slow sites). While the software it attempted to retrieve the verify url, it could work out what license the file claims to be licensed under from the embedded license URL, and show the information about that license but clearly indicate that it is unverified at this point. Currently, if the request for the verify url times out then eventually the file properties window comes up but with no Creative Commons tab, it’s as if there is no CC information embedded in the file. Some sort of caching mechanism could be useful, so that a file could be marked as previously verified, even the verification url isn’t currently accessible. This could also reduce the load on the server hosting the verification data.

I’m not sure if this is possible just using nautilus plugins, but I think it would be a good step towards better CC desktop integration. It would be great if when you hover your mouse over a CC-licensed file, it shows something like “by-nc-nd” to give a quick indication of the license the file claims to be under (maybe the format in which the license name is displayed could be configurable, some people might preter to see the longer “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs”). This information could also be displayed when a directory is displayed in a list view. I’m a KDE user, and konqueror displays a lot of metadata when I hover over a file, though nautilus currently shows me none – I’m assuming that it can do, and I just don’t have it properly configured. Another possible feature is to have some graphical indication that a file is CC-licensed displayed in the corner of the file icon. A small CC symbol would probably do the trick. This could be a different colour depending on whether the CC cache says the file has been verified, the verification has failed, or whether the file is as yet unverified (green, red and amber seem like natural colours to use). It would probably be best if verification urls weren’t queried as soon as a directory containing unverified files was opened – a user could select files and right click to select a manual verification, or right click on a folder to verify all files within. The results of this verification can then be cached (the files could be reverified periodically, or if a reverification is manually forced by the user). Even on an unverified file where the RDF license data hasn’t been downloaded, a mouse-over should tell me that the file claims to be by-nd-2.0 or whatever else it might claim to be.

With this idea, I’m really not sure if it’s possible to implement easily without modifying core nautilus code. A user could open up a dialog at the side of a directory, and then use it to select certain license parameters so as to display files from the current directory (or in subdirectories of the current directory) that meet these requirements. This dialog could have two formats – one where the user simply ticks features such as “Share Alike” or free for commercial use, and the files are shown. A more “wizard” like interface could also be used, that asks questions such as “Are you creating a derivative work” (ok, maybe the word derivative could be changed to something more easily understandable, or you could mouseover or a simple definition) and “Do you want to release your work commercially” – essentially, this tool would help people who are looking on their computer for saved CC-licensed works they could integrate into something they’re working on. I know there’s the Creative Commons Nutch-based search engine, but people might handpick CC-licensed works they really like, and then want to easily sort through them.

An obvious way that the tool can be improved is to add support for other file formats, but I know that standards for this haven’t really been developed yet. Being able to tag images would be extremely useful, especially given that online tools such as flickr have made it so easy to share and distribute CC-licensed pictures (the Flickr CC page shows around 100,000 CC-licensed images). Has EXIF been investigated for JPEG images? Maybe Flickr would be willing to allow CC images to be verified through their site. While I’m mentioning Flickr, integrating Flickr upload of CC-licensed images is also a possible idea, but flickr integration could be well handled by other already available tools, I don’t know. Projects such as jpegrdf have looked at embedding RDF into JPEG images, using the comment section (maybe this is a little hackish, but I suppose there’s no better way). I would imagine it could be significantly easier to embed such data into more modern formats such as SVG.

Those are just some ideas off the top of my head. I hope this helps. Cheers!