Earlier today, Steven Garrity’s excellent essay on Mozilla branding was Slashdotted, bringing his server down for several hours (it’s a common effect).

What is interesting about it is that I personally could not reach the server to read the document, but thanks to the attached Creative Commons license and the license provisions that allow for redistribution, I could find and read the document on one of the mirrors that sprang up, and it was completely legal. In the past, setting up mirrors of Slashdotted articles has been done as a courtesy to other Slashdot readers, but it’s always been of dubious legal standing.

In addition to the legal grey area, sudden spikes of bandwidth often carry high hosting bills for their creators. Of course, you can never know what will strike the fancy of the web community, but Creative Commons licenses do also allow you to host your larger media files at the Internet Archive’s audio and movie areas, free of charge.