I find lots of shades things to explore here. The idea of taking credit for ideas as theft means we own ideas? But that said, often credit/attribution is not given yet it is sometimes with intent, as malice, sometimes as oversight, and sometimes as just not being aware. In all cases, is credit “taken” from someone??

Maybe Michael is speculating an idealized place where attribution/giving credit is such a norm that we do not notice, so then no one might ever feel as if credit has been taken from them? Too idealized for humans methinks.

My interest in this area has been in the reuse of digital content, especially media. Nearly all the focus on open licenses is what the license says is required, or not wanting to break any law/ get sued / get in trouble, So this means, our actions are guided by what is the minimum people should do to avoid breaking the rules of a license of a copyright law.

Minimal performance in school is usually what we consider average, passing. Where this comes into interesting space for me is media, especially photos, that is licensed Creative Commons 0 or public domain, and often the wording is “attribution is not necessary”, so everyone does the minimum. But if I am new to this realm, and I come across a blog post or a presentation of yours with images that you correctly are using, and are not required to attribute, what am I learning about re-use of media? It looks like I should just use anything I find.

I always attribute,m whether I have to or not. Heck, i attribute myself, not to pile on my own ego, but to demonstrate publicly the act.

So I think attributing ought to be reflexive, not because we have to or to show we are not stealing, but because it’s an act of gratitude to someone else’s work, as Scott commented above on the notion of hospitality. I’ve been piling up some stuff on this idea, maybe the Venn diagram of attribution and gratitude–

Computers can’t Give Credit: How Automatic Attribution Falls Short in an Online Remixing Community
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=155320

And some interesting stuff on gratitude and social media by Nate Matias
https://civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/gratitude-and-its-dangers-in-social-technologies
https://civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/researching-love-and-thanks-on-wikipedia-crowdcamp-hackathon-report

I doubt one can go overboard on attribution or gratitude?

Thanks for letting my blog in your comments 😉