Stephen Downes

This part of the ongoing effort by Creative Commons to redefine what it calls "the social contract of sharing." There is no such social contract; sharing doesn't involve any sort of quid pro quo, except perhaps from a commercial perspective. But more interesting than this ongoing media campaign is the idea of provenance itself, which Creative Commons is labeling 'attribution'. We never fully report provenance; the author does not cite his first grade English teacher, though without learning the language he could never have completed his book. The ideas, the turns of phrase, the cultural influences: these are all typically unremarked. Indeed, it's a social and political question that determines what should count as a citation and what should not (there's an explicit parallel in the logic of explanation, where we search for 'causes' in a complex soup of interactions). Why does Wikipedia cite newspapers and journal articles and not, say, my blog? Why is the person who publishes an article considered the discoverer of a phenomenon, or the coiner of a term, even when the actual act of discovery or coinage took place elsewhere? Is Creative Commons protecting creators with this focus on attribution, or is it entrenching privilege?