Here is one idea for how this problem might be solved. 

1. A site owner creates an account at a search engine where they establish their identity and receive a unique site id.
2. The site owner then logs in and provides an article, which the search engine in turn gives an article id.  The author embeds this id in the cotent via some kind of meta tag when the article is published to the web.
3. When content is analyzed by the engine during its normal indexing process, if it sees an article id, the search engine cross-references the id with the site owner id and profile to see if it is registered to that site owner. If the article is registered, the site owner is considered the source whenever there is a question of duplicate content where some site must be hidden.
4. To deal with instances where content is fraudulently registered, you would need some kind of challenge process where someone could submit evidence that they were the rightful author. In turn, site owners found to be repeat offenders in terms of false content registrations could have their accounts revoked and could be removed from the SERPs entirely in extreme cases.

There would seem to be benefits all around from this kind of system.  First of all, site owners who work hard to create original content would have more time to spend being creative and could spend less time on copyscape and similar services hunting down the people stealing their articles.  It might promote greater use of RSS, as you could build into feed systems something where it is not syndicated until each entry is tagged with a valid article id, giving possible syndicators less to worry about in terms of duplicate content penalties.  The engines themselves would benefit as well as they would have a good way to have content pumped into them directly without having to be as dependant on going out to find content.  Also, the engines would have yet another possible tool to use to round up and discipline spammers.

There are of course a ton of logistical issues to overcome, and figuring out what to do with all the existing content out there would be an enormous hassle, with huge potential for fraudulent claims.  However, ultimately we need something better than the copyright system to identify the source of content.   

By the way, if someone does create such a system, I claim my right to article ID #1.  First registered post!

There are current efforts though that could potentially make this question much easier to answer. XFN, the XHTML Friends Network protocol put forward by gmpg.org is a great example of how embedding meta data in links can help create a more exposed intentional web. XFN allows you in Blogrolls (or other places) to indicate what your relationship is to the authors of the other sites you are linking to. You can specify for example that you are someone’s partner or friend. XFN is very cool, but limited in scope to unearthing human interrelationships represented by links. While that makes a ton of sense in the world of blogs, it is not quite as appropriate to a corporate or organizational site. It would be great though to take this idea and extend it to an entire vocabulary of embedded meta info in links in essence having every link tell you why it exists (why? links). I should be able to say in my link tags, I made this link to try to make money though an affiliate relationship. Or, I made this link because I think people should be aware of the information this article is sharing. Or, I made this link because this photo is hideous and I can’t believe someone put it in their personal profile.

Like everything else of course this would be prone to abuse. Spammers would just use whatever the most positive meta inflection was for their purposes. However, leaving that issue aside for the moment, if we could promote this kind of linking behavior, it really could make the web much more searchable. You could use news type links to come up with sites that are relevant to info seeking queries. You could use humor type links to find relevant results for entertainment seeking queries. Quite aside from what it might do for search engines, this would also provide interesting data for potential interfaces for browsers. Let’s say I want to hide all the ads for example, or that I only want to see links that will show me the kind of informational relationships I am looking for. This would make that possible, in an opt in way for both browsers and web authors.

Of course, there’s no particular reason just to limit this kind of thing to links. Why not have a whole internal element based meta data language where I can tag a picture as an ad or a sentence as a joke or a paragraph as a recipe? Page level meta data is appropriate to situations where a page is monolithic in focus but these days many sites are far from monolithic, having many intentions on one page and many forms of information serving various purposes. Let us make our intentions clear! And then pay attention, and let’s see what happens.

If we take the online dating paradigm and integrated it into the nightclub we could create a completely legibile environment to simplify things. Imagine that the floor, furniture and seating were differently colored and labeled, so there was an area to hang out for singles versus people already in a relationship. You could divide it up into straight and gay. You could further subdivide to make it clear who wasn’t tolerant of monogamy or who was really, really into feet. You could divide things by income bracket and political party. Put all the people that have ever been arrested in a particular area along with all kinds of demarcation around who arrived with whom and who has been involved before in past relationships. The club could be called ID (Identifiable Differences).

Of course there would be the problem of people not telling the truth. Beyond that though, what would this legibility produce in terms of pushing or not pushing boundaries? If you’ve never been with a person of the same sex and you all of a sudden get groped in a nightclub by someone fitting that description it does make you think if your lack of experiences makes any sense. But when everything is made legible, are we constrained? Or would it instead through its clear distinctions make you keenly aware of what you were and were not, and hold you accountable for your limitations? It would be great if someone would build it so we could find out. I would be hanging out in the corner with the other magick freak smart boy loners that are really into pinball (we all fit some kind of description in the end).