Transcopyright and the Possibility of a Transpublishing World

We can republish by indirection on the Web, telling the browser to get a piece somewhere else.  Right now, with no difficulty, you may put in a pointer-- an IMG tag-- which brings in a .gif or .jpg picture from publicly available page on the Internet.

The main reason we don't do this is that we don't have permission.

This kind of indirect publishing, also called "transpublishing" and "inclusion by reference", may be way to clean up the copyright problem.

Other people have treated re-use of copyrighted material as something to be prevented.  The transcopyright approach treats it as something to be guided and appropriately channeled, for everyone's benefit.

The key is this: the republished piece is always downloaded from the original publisher's server.  That way, if there is a charge for the material, it is always paid to the original publisher.

The permission doctrine of transcopyright is a central aspect of this.  It's a way of cleanly giving permission for someone to re-publish material indirectly.

The parts needed are:

• A legal method for permitting transpublishing, or republication by reference.  The transcopyright permission method accomplishes this purpose: the rightsholder places a permission statement on line (see sample permission statement).
• A standardized tag which will bring in an arbitrary portion of participating text from the net.  We have proposed this as a net RFC (by Andrew Pam).
• A server that will deliver, or sell, minute portions of text ordered by a browser on the basis of such a tag.  We have prototyped this and are working on a more robust version.  The prototype also simulates the resulting page..
• A payment system that will invisibly purchase and assemble the quoted portions of a compound document.  The user can set a payment threshold below which a click means an automatic purchase.  We have prototyped such a system (HyperCoin(tm)).  Unlike other payment systems, HyperCoin may be applied to materials already in place, and is designed for many-to-many micropayment-- so that any account-holder may be both a buyer and a seller.