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[Gnu-arch-users] [FOSDEM substite 3] "Who Owns the Author?"
From: |
Thomas Lord |
Subject: |
[Gnu-arch-users] [FOSDEM substite 3] "Who Owns the Author?" |
Date: |
Fri, 24 Feb 2006 22:43:24 -0800 |
Since I won't be at FOSDEM I'm not preparing a talk or slides. I am,
however, writing a brief series of short essays about the topic I
meant to speak about.
This is the third essay. The earlier essays were:
1. The King's English
2. The Literature Shelf is Not Literature
This essay is quite short. It assumes you have read the other two.
Who Owns the Author?
To "become the author" of a web document means to acquire or create
the globally unique name for a document along with the exclusive,
transferable, sub-dividable rights to modulate the contents of that
document.
On the current web, to "become the author" means to acquire a lease
on the rights for some corner of the DNS-based URL+request document
name-space. This is quite expensive and leads to content which is
not of archival quality (because such links rot).
The challenge, then, is to devise a system of authorship -- the
divisible, exclusive, transferable right to modify a reference-able
document -- to devise such a system where authorship exists in such
abundance as to be too cheap to meter and where the documents exist
in such a state that they can be archived and preserved regardless
of what happens to the authorship.
In the second essay, "The Literature Shelf is not Literature", we
saw that we need a good approximation of True Names for documents
to enable archiving of web documents.
Here, we have learned that documents must have access control (at
least for "right to modify") and that that access control has the
form of sub-dividable property, roughly speaking. Selling off such
access rights is how the current web works. Our challenge (as far
as authorship is concerned) is to make such rights far, far, far
less expensive.
Enough of my grey-beard high-level talk. Next essay, we can start
to get down to the technical nitty gritty.
- [Gnu-arch-users] [FOSDEM substite 3] "Who Owns the Author?",
Thomas Lord <=