Well, to be fair, Ted Nelson designed Xanadu so that everything would be automatic. The design called for everyone to have a single verified identity linked to their payment information, and they could both make and receive payments with automatically. If you copied and pasted (or transcluded, rather) content from one document to another, the authorship information would go with it (assuming that nobody cheated), and your viewers would pay both you and that other author when they viewed the resulting document.

I don’t think it would really work, but it wouldn’t be exhausting either. You wouldn’t have to put in your credit card number and address every time you viewed a document.