The open infrastructure we’re working on at Mediachain aims to solve the exact problem you identify:

how difficult it is now to track the source url of images and content posted on e.g. Facebook and Twitter.

Mediachain solves this problem by combining a decentralized database (a “blockchain”) with content recognition technology that functions similar to Shazam or Reverse Image Search — allowing applications to identify media based on how it looks or sounds.

We blogged about a GIF that went viral when David Bowie passed away earlier this year, and how the creator of that GIF could benefit from an open protocol to preserve credit, the platform of origin, and the history of interactions with the image as it propagated online.

From The GIF That Fell To Earth:

What if any image, video, or song you saw online resolved to a chain of metadata that recorded and preserved all the important information about the life of the work on the internet?

The act of seeing an image would open a gateway to an artist’s identity, the work’s history, or more works by the creator.

Attribution would always be preserved, context and history would never be lost, and the life of an image could always be visualized.

This future could look something like this: