Authorship is not as easy as it sounds

If you're a developer creating a CMS like Wordpress or Ghost, you will probably have to deal with authorship at some point. Should the author field be a dropdown? How should it be populated? Just registered users? Should the user be able to select more than one?

On second thought, is the user the author? Or is the author perhaps not the person who pressed the publish button? That might be an assistant or an editor in a newsroom. What sort of assumptions about authorship should the software make?

Also, a user could just copy and paste someone else's content and publish it as their own and list themselves as the author. Is that something that this software should be concerned with?

With distributed ledgers, we know what a wallet address does, but we don't know who is in control of it at any given time. Even ascribing authorship to a public key or wallet address can quickly lead us astray.

The best answer, we think, evades common sense because it is so unsatisfying and messy. The author is subjective, fluid, and local.

Without knowing the context of where a blog post will be read, or who will read it, or what their criteria are for determining authorship … we're just shooting in the dark.

So what do we know now? We know that at this point in time, the person controlling this account published this content. Ideally, no claims of authorship should be made by the software, but until now that would've meant ludicrous UX and a failure to chip any software at all.

Now, however, with Ethereum Attestation Service and similar protocols, we can leave the concept of authorship fluid and open while still taking a position on its meaning in the present moment for the sake of our immediate purposes.

One way this can happen is by reputable entities attesting to the authorship of a piece of content. "Reputable" will vary by audience, but because the content is on a public network, audiences can use the apps that they trust to surface a piece of content and attach the author that meets their criteria.