Edited by author 12-21-2002 05:48 PM
Fair use still applies - mediAgora is a voluntary payment encouragement system, not a replacement for copyright law.
In the case of a weblog post, the original post was presumably free, so citing it would mean you charge your customers the same price, ie nothing.
A hidden presumption in mediAgora is that the works in question are substantial enough to deserve payment of a few cents at least; this is one reason DRM is discouraged. While the basic model scales to arbitrarily small payments, in practice the 'mental transaction costs' that Odlyzko disucsses for the purchasers would likely come into play before the transaction costs of the payment measurement system. A practical implementation would probably impose a minimum price.

How does this play in weblogs? Lots of presumably fair-use citation of others' posts. Do blogging tools need to recognize citations?

You're very welcome, Andrea, and sorry for the lag in replying.

As you say, textual works are problematic in this way, because of the rarity of wholesale embedding; quoting short passages is quite common and acceptred, and in those cases being able to link to the full work is an improvement on print citation styles, but the web provides us with a good way to do this already - my http://mediagora.com/sources.html page links to both full online texts and to print editions (via Amazon).

Stephen Fry (in The Hippopotamus) comments on how poetry vanishes into the public domain as it is repeated.

One method would be to use the subdivision techniques discussed in the paragraphsmall pieces tightly bound - publish a collections of poems both individually with a small price, and as a collection that offers better value.

Defining derivative works is something that keeps courts very busy at the moment - many of the egregious examples of copyright abuse that Lessig cites are in this area. These disputes usually only arise once the derivative has made some money, and often do need to be settled by negotiation or litigation.

If Jim cites Bob's work through mediAgora, then he should be driving sales to Bob for the work that is incorporated - if he writes a short story based on characters in Bob's indivisible novel, then he is expecting his readers to have bought and read Bob's novel first. If they buy Jim's short story, then they have bought Bob's novel too.

A way to resolve disputes over attribution and plagiarism will need to be part of the mediAgora terms of use - perhaps reputation ratings as used successfully by eBay for rating buyers and sellers could come into play.

Well, I'm going to take my first few tentative steps into the mediAgora discussion. Hopefully what I say will make sense and add something to the conversation.

Since I write, I naturally start envisioning how mediAgora would apply to a writer wishing to disseminate his/her works (poetry, fiction, non-, what-have-you) in digital form.

Naturally, I can see a direct and application for the collaborative or incorporative aspects of mediAgora for something like music or visual digital art. There are examples of songs that use looping tracks, music, or lyrics from other musicians; and Photoshopping has created a whole new dimension to incorporating images into something new and interesting.

However, in literary terms, I see this as getting potentially confusing. I'm sort of unclear how things like literary allusion or quoting another's work would fit into the mediAgora model from a writer's standpoint. The only clear application I can see is for something like adapting a screenplay / play from a novel or vice versa-- and maybe that's really the only type of derivative work this model is supposed to account for in a written-work context.

I suppose I just see this as maybe a potential for exploitation of the openness of the model. Bob writes his grand opus, and Jim writes a short story loosely inspired by it that alludes to it, so can Bob legitimately say, "You owe me money because your work is a derivative of mine?" I guess what I'm asking for is a more specific definition of "derivative"-- or is that not particularly important at this stage?