Cut-and-paste is now part of the fabric of everyday digital activity for huge numbers of people. When you have transferred something from one file to another, it blends in seamlessly, taking on the same status as the original content.
Today’s invention aims to give some credit to the author of each such snippet ( way beyond the usual level of tracking changes).
Every document created would have a unique identifier (a code representing the author, software, date etc). Whenever a section of text, or other data, was copied and pasted into a new file, that content would retain the identifier of the source document so that the provenance of the transferred parts would always be available to anyone interested. This would automatically credit the originator.
This would greatly limit the scope for plagiarism, as well as calming the fevered brows of those who may be overly concerned with defending their copyright.
It now seems that someone is following up this idea -see this.
