I hadn’t heard of this before. At one time in the world of big “alt” media like Gawker and Buzzfeed, a group of commercial bloggers tried to socially enforce a pair of weird symbols to denote different types of credit. One symbol would indicate that “the discovery of the information is being credited to somebody else.” The other weird symbol would be a direct link to the source material.
On one side: I can’t begin to see why this particular distinction needs weird symbols. In older types of publication, guilds enforce proper citation without symbols. You can’t get a “scientific” paper published in a “reputable” journal unless you follow these rules.
On the other side: If you had enough guild force you could redesign HTML and the structure of the web to enforce two-way linking through a digital version of impedance measurement. Before the ShareValueization of phone companies by antitrust in the 80s, landline phone companies could detect an illegal extension by measuring impedance as seen from the central exchange. If you connected an extra phone in parallel to your one paid phone, the resistance of your line would decrease because the ringer of each phone is a low-resistance load. Two ringers in parallel show half the resistance of one ringer.
A credit-sensitive web could detect copy-pasting and rewrite your HTML to include a credited HREF. Or less forcefully, it could detect when you insert a HREF and automatically notify the target of the HREF.
In reality a form of impedance sensing already happens post hoc. Large copyright holders like AP and Getty Images constantly patrol the web using AI to detect copies of their work and issue takedown requests. Small copyright holders don’t have the resources or connections to run this type of check.
On the third side: Copyrights and patents have always been about MONEY, not crediting the author or inventor. A phone company loses rental income when you connect an extra extension. Copyrights and patents protect publishers and corporations, not authors or inventors. Getty and AP lose royalties when their property is used without licensing, so detection is worth the expense for them. In the academic world, job security depends on maximizing the number of named references to your articles, so it’s FINANCIALLY worthwhile for the guild to enforce named references.
Therefore: If you want your ideas to spread and persist, it’s BETTER to leave copyrights and patents out of the picture. An idea or image or sentence will spread farther and longer if each spreader doesn’t have to pay royalties or specify its source.
Nature doesn’t have copyrights. A plant wants its offspring to spread far and wide, so it induces birds and bugs and mammals to eat its fruit or catch its pollen. A virus wants to spread, so it invades your nose and induces you to sneeze. The plant or virus doesn’t require the bird or nose to pay royalties or name the source; in fact it wants to HIDE the seeds during the process of spreading.
Polistra's Mill 