“While we have systems in place for literary citation, image attribution, and scientific reference, we don’t yet have a system that codifies the attribution of discovery in curation as a currency of the information economy, a system that treats discovery as the creative labor that it is. This is what The Curator’s Code is – a system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, the celebrated norm.”
It appears as though the project is not adding “rel=’nofollow'” to the links it is encouraging others to use – without implying any sinister motive, this practice is also used by a variety of spammers who are attempting to dupe others into increasing the apparent value of their own site on the internet (search engines like Google will follow any links which are not tagged “nofollow” and attribute greater search ranking to the page targeted by the link).
Having said that, it seems highly unlikely that the creators of the curator’s code project would be wholly unaware of this fact…