RE: What if Steemit could tell you the original creator of an image or article?

@williambanks thanks for the deep thought and response!

Absolutely agree with you that the system cannot be certain about correct attribution—claims of ownership are always subject to reputation.

For example, if i didn't see Leonardo Da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa, I have to trust that the placard displayed next to the painting at the Louvre Museum is well researched and correct. Effectively, i have to trust the Louvre Museum as an arbiter of reputation for the claim that Leonardo Da Vinci is the painter.

As a musician, you might appreciate this blog post I wrote titled What a blockchain for music really means? It explains:

All (claims) published to the system must be signed by the contributor using cryptography. This ensures data is attributed and can be filtered by identity. For example, you could query for data from whitelisted entities and ignore data from unknown participants.

This means you could filter claims by those that have been well researched by trusted parties, like the Louvre Museum, or the Cheetah Bot. Perhaps there is even a way to implement an incentivized voting system like Steem has, in order to crowdsource reputation for claims?

Our insight is that today, information about creative works is fractured across various siloed platforms and databases. (This is especially true in the music industry!) It's very difficult to discover all the things people have said about a unit of media in it's life online. Our goal is to build a single open network to collaboratively describe and make statements or claims about creative works, like attribution for the creator that persists across platforms. We think this is orders of magnitude better than the current state of affairs as it allows those claims and statements to be easily discovered and filtered by reputation.

For any developers curious to try it out, we posted a five minute tutorial to get setup with read/writes to the Mediachain testnet. The system is still skeletal at this point and more detailed documentation can be found here.