THE PROBLEMS OF REUSE, ATTRIBUTION, AND PROVENANCE

WHAT:

Media is duplicated (sometimes lossily) and stored/re-hosted by users & 3rd parties without attribution & with no links back to its original source.

This isn't always piracy. In fact, it's overwhelmingly done in the pursuit of legitimate activity. Sharing media for the purposes of promotion, commentary, and critique is a legitimate activity. Reuse in the creation of derivative works such as mash-ups, remixes, parodies, anthologies, memes, and détournements is a legitimate activity. And saving media to a personal library/collection of reference material or even a private fan collection is, to me, a legitimate activity (before you disagree, tell me if you use Pinterest).

Yet in the process of doing these things, people produce and redistribute copies – often degraded or incomplete copies – of authored material with their authorship and licensing information as well as their intended publication context removed.

WHY:

Users have no other choice.

Networked transclusion-based documents are nonexistent[*], so no document creation apps facilitate copy-by-reference.

Even if more apps and document formats supported network transclusion of text and audiovisual content, attribution and licensing information is not available in a consistent and easily-discoverable method on most Web media resources.

Furthermore, rights holders are almost totally antagonistic to reuse. They want you consuming their "content" on their site because the only way they can generate revenue is by putting you in front of advertisers or converting your views to direct sales of some kind (this includes paywalling content).

And finally, there is a historical legacy of "anti-leeching" on the Web which is now a laughably anachronistic cultural artifact of a low-bandwidth early Web. "Leeching", or cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), in xanalogical terms is called transclusion, and is a core feature of the system.

How Alph Addresses These Issues

Having a hypertext ecosystem that is xanalogical (transclusion-based, deeply-linked) and which features a ubiquitous application of Linked Data for authorship, licensing, and contextual information would, I believe, resolve some of these issues.

If the SYSTEM (this doesn't just mean specs, models, protocols, and interfaces - this also means applications, UX conventions, and cultural norms) can do the following:

1. Make it easy to create documents that transclude rather than duplicate

2. Make it easy to link-to or transclude a resource as a way of "saving" it

3. Serve attribution, licensing, and context information on EVERY resource, and

4. Make it obvious and easy for users to find that information

Then it will make it possible to create an online culture that prefers reuse/hot-linking over unregulated duplication and redistribution that orphans authored material from its creators. The only way to make the benefits of copy-by-reference clear to users and make them WANT it is by building working prototypes (hello, Alph!), and creating demos/explainers to educate them.

It will be equally important to make the benefits clear to creators! When people copy/paste your writing, take/share screenshots, or directly download your stuff, it's orphaned – the connection to its source is lost[*]. Rather than trying to block people from reuse because you can't account for all of the duplicate copies in circulation, just make it easy for them to copy-by-reference/transclude the work; they won't have to duplicate it, and you can know that wherever your work appears online that users will be able to find its source, and you will know what the reuse volume is[**].

With respect to the MONEY PROBLEM:

This is the real issue. People silo media online because it's the only way to ensure that revenue is collected. The classic xanalogical approach to monetization was micropayments - very small financial transactions going from users to publishers, authors, and other rights-holders when media is viewed.

Micropayments are beyond the scope of Alph. Alph is an open culture project, not a commercial project, but it's worth outlining how micropayments for transclusions could work, just to give voice to one potential solution to what is certainly the most intractable part of the reuse problem.

For more information on this, check out the MICROPAYMENTS explainer here: <http://alph.io/explainers/micropayments>

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