I recently saw a press release (someone’s startup promoting extensions to robots.txt) disguised as a piece of technology news in The Age. How about announcing an OAuth-style automated licensing contract (ala CC) schema? (Version two could threaten microtransactions. :) I think smart VC’d grok that.

Hmm, maybe this is still Attribution.org…

I remember when the Creative Commons was touted on cni-copyright back in the mid-90s. I thought it sounded a bit too much like taking up the weapons of the enemy—but then, I was a little more ideologically shortsighted in those days. Naturally, its slick professionalism and credible academic backing have seen it develop into a mainstream organisation: one with real potential for a major cultural shift away from the fence-builders of the memepool. With the Age of the Remix ever-extending its influence, this is a Big Thing, and the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license is probably the closest thing Western Culture is ever likely to come to the natural state. It’s a bandwagon well worth hitching to.

The world of the internet age is moving towards a reputation economy. This will raise all kinds of questions about virtual identity and about personal honesty; we’re already seeing extreme negative examples of the consequences of their intersection. Anonymity is terrific in many circumstances, but the absolute verification of identity is becoming ever more critical in an environment overshadowed by the tech-leveraged power of the equivalent of petty crims. In fact, Reputation generally is a Hard Problem without it. (That’s not to say it’s the answer to all Reputation’s problems, of course.) The problem’s not a simple one, and intuitively the answer should really include the word “distributed”, but attribution.org is a clear fit for an industry-standardising, ui-simplified, electronically verified and tracked, generalised “creative work” attribution system, leveraging compatibility with the automated licensing schema of the Creative Commons and extending to media such as website mashups, fanfic, machinima and user generated game content.

I just need to find the time.