New York Times And Google Look To Use SVW’s Adtribution Model

Tom Foremski starts out by talking about the AP copyright brouhaha and winds up taking a lefthand turn into a very interesting convention. He suggests that we should all agree to a stricter approach to giving credit to the sources of anything we post, which he calls “adtribution”:

[from Support the Source: Creating a New Media Business Model and Keeping the Web Open]

[…]

My proposal is a voluntary system in which you quote freely from a site and you republish an “adtribution link” next to it that would help support the source site. An adtribution link would be a simple text link ad set by the source site. This would meritorious support because only good content gets quoted and the bad doesn’t.

The adtribution link could be identified this way:

Support the source: Rave reviews find out why! - Order the The Amazon Kindle Electronic Book Reader!

The “Support the source” identifies the adtribution link that could be in green to signify its link to money.

If you quote from a page with an adtribution link you would copy and paste the entire link, including “Support the source” which identifies and links to the source site. It shows that you are respectful of the work of others and it also allows you to support your favorite sites without it costing you anything.

In this way good content gets the distribution it deserves, and so does the adtribution link that helps support that content.

It is a win-win situation. It doesn’t cost anything to “support the source.” And it would help great content producers create more great content — creating a virtuous circle.

This is a further embellishment on the web standard of attribution, but the idea of a better formed microformat is cool.

However, it doesn’t solve the core copyright issues of the AP case.