What is the current view of IP in Web 2.0?
Distribution of information become more collaborative, dynamic, and social, and as application software evolves to support “mashups” that combine both content and functionality from various sources, traditional definitions of “documents,” their authorship, and their ownership are becoming obsolete.
Not only is it possible to massively duplicate documents without permission, it is also increasingly possible to modify these documents so that the original intention of the author can become lost. In addition, collaborative document authoring, unless carefully controlled, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to identify and track the authorship contributions of individual authors.
We are still skeptical about the ability of individual registration systems, built around concepts of static documents carried over from pre-Internet days, to solve the problem of ownership and identification when documents are constantly changing or are authored collaboratively by groups of temporarily involved authors.
For certain classes of digital documents, the documents themselves should incorporate information traditionally associated with registration systems, as well as information that records the changes and modifications made over time by authors. This meta-information, always physically associated with the source document, should always be available for processing in connection with any business transaction that might require authorship and ownership information.
Web 2.0 Document Authoring
In the world of “Web 2.0” it keeps getting easier to collaboratively collect and distribute information content and associated metadata. Readily available aggregations of XML feeds, along with richly-functional remotely hosted content management applications, are enabling people to combine information sources of all kinds in new, unique, and potentially very powerful ways. “Mash-ups” of applications and data drawn from multiple sources are beginning to appear online, facilitated by the evolution of modern application architectures and data standards that facilitate interchangeability.
This is a far cry from the static publishing models of the past. The old focus was on creation of a fixed published object like a page, a book, or a magazine article with a specified set of one or more authors. With Web 2.0 we are now seeing how information -- and operations on information -- are becoming increasingly fluid, flexible, network oriented, and social.
One example is the constantly evolving online encyclopedia Wikipedia with its array of online contributors. Similar wiki technology is being applied to a more specialized application like the Peer to Patent Project which may also take advantage of social networking techniques to improve the patent review process.
Despite this move towards acceptance of a fluid publishing model -- where it’s not always clear where information is stored and who has a hand in information creation or modification -- I believe that it is still important that we not destroy the integrity of the intellectual property we now find so easy to copy and manipulate.
Orienting Oneself on the Web
We would like to know a few things when we go online:
First, where am I? Am I working on my own machine, or am I working on a machine (and content) with tools located on my machine, or are they located elsewhere? We would like to know this for reasons:
Transmission delays may impact speed and performance of the network operation, especially if both the data and the application are located remotely and have to be continually transferred to my machine for processing and display.
If the connection with a remote server is lost, we want reassurance we can recover and/or continue working. Not knowing where we are with respect to the work complicates the recovery in face of a network or remote hard drive failure.
Second, we usually like to know whose information we are working with? We would like to know the provenance of the information -- its history, ownership, authorship, and credibility. Even simple "facts" don't make much sense without context. Key critical contextual details we want to know about include:
1) Who wrote this thing?
2) Is this what was written?
3) What kinds of changes and modifications has this object gone through?
We would then be left to ponder upon what can happen when, on the Web, content and format become separated, perhaps unintentionally. The result can be that the original intended meaning of a “document” is lost; This example is a metaphor of what is bound to happen as collaborative Web 2.0 technologies become more ingrained in day to day communications.
Group Ownership
Another consideration beyond the unintended alteration by the system of a document’s intended meaning is that, if we write something that is likely to be changed by the distribution system or by the actions of collaborating authors, what do we “own,” the whole document, or just the part we wrote?
And what if, when we write a blog article, where we display a copyright notice, we then come back repeatedly and change, update, and correct the original, and add comments? Even if we can legitimately claim ownership of each different version of my document, do we have a way of knowing if people who read the original will know that we've made corrections or changes? And, if there is a danger that early drafts will be cached and downloaded, do we have any moral or legal responsibility for seeking out and communicating with downloaders to tell them that something has changed? (What if the changes we make have the effect of removing mistakes that might have caused personal injury?)
These are difficult questions that are raised by several factors, including:
- The malleable nature of documents and information when published on the web.
- The difficulty in assigning ownership and responsibility when multiple people are involved in creating and/or updating a document.
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