Imagine …

Whenever a piece of content is created the author or publisher would add that content to a google index along with the rules for fair use of that content. For example, if I write a blog post I might label it as free to all. If I have a newsletter I might say it’s only free on my site and on my partner sites. I might make some content free provided it is accompanied by a specified ad. Or I might assign a use fee to it — a flat fee, or based on the number of views, or whatever.

When a legit site wants to find a useful piece of content, the content curator would search through the google content repository and find what they want, then see if the terms of use make sense for them. If they found some random article they wanted to use they could post a snippet into the search to find out who created it and the terms for use.

There’d be no need to hunt down authors, negotiate fees or any of that. You could do it all through the google tool.

Then, as the Google web crawler searched the internet, it would compare all content on all pages against that index and check to see if the rules are being followed. If it found a violation it would remove that site from its search results, send a notification to the site owner and to the content author, and also to a copyright enforcement agency.