Documents are no longer static and unchanging. As the creation and 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.
This author is skeptical of 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.
What may be more appropriate, this author feels, is that 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 the author (or 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
Usually I try to understand issues like these by relating them to my own experience. I’ll do that here.
Perhaps the concerns that follow are examples of an "old school" attitude, but I still like to know a few things when I fire up my computer and 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? I like to know this for good reasons:
- Transmission delays may impact speed and performance of the network operation I'm performing, especially if both the data and the application I’m working on are located remotely and have to be continually transferred to my machine for processing and display.
- If my connection with a remote server is lost, I want reassurance I can recover and/or continue working. Not knowing where I am with respect to my work complicates my recovery in face of a network or remote hard drive failure.
Second, I usually like to know whose information am I working with? I 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 I want to know about include:
- Who wrote this thing?
- Is this what was written?
- What kinds of changes and modifications has this object gone through?
This latter issue takes me to a recent personal experience that drove home 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; I consider this example to be a metaphor of what is bound to happen as collaborative Web 2.0 technologies become more ingrained in day to day communications.
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