A Multiple Authorship Model in User Generated Content

The popularity of online sharing sites featuring user-generated content (UGC) has brought a dramatic increase in production and reproduction of UGCs. Time magazine's selection of "You" as its person of the year 2006 apparently shows the rapid rise of users as content producers. We are now entering an era of prosumers where the role of producers and consumers is beginning to merge as predicted by Alvin Toffler. In the world of prosumers, a single content evolves into many derivative contents as seen in the phenomenon of Star Wars Kid, where many adapted versions of the original content were created, adding music, texts, etc. This kind of collaborative authorship model is difficult to represent using conventional authorship models. Collaborative authorship is a dynamic authorship where additional authorship information is appended to the existing authorship information. This paper defines extended concepts of authorship, lists their requirements and proposes a scheme to support them.