It's a partial screenshot of the article in my browser. I intend to use it in a lecture as an example of the complications behind fair use. (irl I really do teach such a lecture). Who is it attributable to? The artist of the drawing, me, techcrunch or mediachain?
In short: I am suspicious of any service, and there have been a few, that claims to be able to identify the owner or creator of a work. It's a layering problem, with nearly every digital image being at some level the property of a great many people.
(fyi: if this was a law exam, the best answer is "me" in that I created the composition and am well-covered by fair use in my use of it here.)
Declaring ownership and provenance with complete certainty is very hard, which is why we don't profess to do it. Our approach is to nondestructively aggregate potentially conflicting claims and allow for more nuanced resolution at read time, as appropriate for a given situation. In your particular example, we would have a chain of derivative works.
Obviously, in certain cases (payment routing) a definitive answer is required, but this is already something that PROs and similar organizations deal with on a daily basis, and we can support their arbitration.
If you plan on linking money to content, you better have a really definitive answer. That movement of money is essentially the purchase of a license. If a business or individual relies on your answer as to who that license should be purchased from, they do not want to be hit with a copyright complaint should the real owner appear. And if people end up abusing your system to monetize content that they should not, expect all sorts of legal docs in the mail.
It's a partial screenshot of the article in my browser. I intend to use it in a lecture as an example of the complications behind fair use. (irl I really do teach such a lecture). Who is it attributable to? The artist of the drawing, me, techcrunch or mediachain?
In short: I am suspicious of any service, and there have been a few, that claims to be able to identify the owner or creator of a work. It's a layering problem, with nearly every digital image being at some level the property of a great many people.
(fyi: if this was a law exam, the best answer is "me" in that I created the composition and am well-covered by fair use in my use of it here.)