THE PROBLEMS OF REUSE, ATTRIBUTION, AND PROVENANCE

Transclusion for Fair Re-Use

The current Web is unfortunately a system in which users copy-and-paste the bytes of text from one document into another, often with no attribution. For a global hypermedia network, the ways that art and literature are recirculated are astonishingly network-unaware. It is, more or less, photocopiers and postal mail, although improved by orders of magnitude in speed and efficiency. Nowadays, with vanishingly few young people even knowing how to save an image file from the Web, the reflexive way of "hanging onto something" is to take a screenshot - and the analogy with photocopying is even more apt than it was 20 years ago.

The tools and mechanisms don't currently exist to reuse media in a network-aware way. Provenance is lost, media is "orphaned" everywhere, because copy-by-reference - that is, transclusion - is not robustly implemented.

One reason for this is that the Web has historically been antagonistic to "hot-linking", now called Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. While there were significant limitations to the bandwidth available to Web site authors in the first decades of the Web which led to the strong negative attitudes towards "leeching" images and data, the xanalogical model is built around the idea of leeching. You publish your media and documents, and everyone on the network is at liberty to hot-link to them - in fact, we should INSIST that you hot-link (transclude) instead of duplicating to another server...

Imagine instead a system where it is trivially easy for users to copy-and-paste BY REFERENCE, so that the text or images that they want to reuse retain their connection to their source. Imagine being able to select any portion of text and call-up its source media and original publication context. Imagine a system that encourages and facilitates mash-up, compilation, quotation, detournement, and in which it is simple for users to peel-away the layers of reuse to find the authorship and origin of all the constituent parts.

When we copy and paste material on our computers, what is typically happening is that the media being "copied" is literally duplicated and stored into another document/container.

When I say "copy-by-reference," I am referring to a different process whereby the material that we wish to "copy" is only referred-to rather than duplicated. When the document that the material is "copied" into is viewed, the source material is temporarily loaded in order to be shown to the user, but is not stored in the document. This load-to-show & leave-in-place process is called TRANSCLUSION.

The advantage of transclusion and copy-by-reference is that in order for it to work, there MUST be a discoverable, valid reference to the location of the original media, whereas in classical copy-and-paste, the media is duplicated anonymously and without context and provenance – which is a bad thing.

The benefits to users seem enormous and obvious to me, but the benefit to copyright holders is equally important. Of course it behoves publishers and rights-holders to be able to control (that is, limit) the distribution of their intellectual property, and one of the chief reasons for wanting to do this is that freely-distributed copies of one's work are rather difficult to monetize. The classical xanalogical solution to this problem is a system that facilitates micropayments – but that, friend, is beyond the scope of the Alph project (a gutless, cop-out, I know – forgive me!). However, there are still important benefits to independent artists such as myself (I'm an illustrator by trade) that would come from opting-in to a free transcopyright arrangement with respect to the distribution of our works in a xanalogical/transclusion-based system. I/you/we would be able to see where our work is being used, how widespread its circulation is, and we would benefit from the fact that if anyone were interested enough to do something as trivial as right-click on our writing or artwork, they could effortlessly find its authorship information, its uncropped, unadorned appearance, and even its original publication context, from wherever and however it has been republished online. From the point of view of someone who freely distributes reasonably high-quality versions of my artwork online as a form of self-promotion in order to generate paying commissions for the creation of new work, widespread distribution of my work is a GOOD THING – as long as people are able to find-out who the artist was and how to contact them!

I posit that:

If media is always retrieved from its owner's servers, the owner can know how much interest and usage their media enjoys, while the viewer can ensure its authenticity.

If owner servers always offer rich metadata on every piece of served media, ownership/rights are never ambiguous.

If media owners use viewing context links, users can always easily find the presentation of the content that its owners intended.

If media is streamed from owner's servers, assigning royalty/ad revenue payouts proportionally is easier/fairer.

People should not have to duplicate data all over the place, erasing provenance and ambiguating authorship/origin. It's networked media! It should be transcluded, called-up from its original source, always! If the tools existed to make this easy, I believe that people would use them.

I want a hypertext system that ENCOURAGES reuse, mash-ups, compilation, recontextualization, in a network-centric way that respects authors and creators.

Let's build it!