Wonder how Attributor Corp will handle blogs, such as this one, who use chunks of articles for personal use?
Copyright Tool Will Scan Web For Violations - WSJ.com To deal with the mounting copyright issues swirling around video and other content online, a start-up founded by some respected Silicon Valley executives is taking a novel approach: combing the entire Web for unauthorized uses.Privately held Attributor Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., has begun testing a system to scan the billions of pages on the Web for clients' audio, video, images and text -- potentially making it easier for owners to request that Web sites take content down or provide payment for its use.
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Though its service isn't out yet, Attributor appears to go further than existing techniques for weeding out unauthorized uses of content online. While companies are tackling parts of the same problem -- Indigo Stream Technologies Ltd., based in Gibraltar, offers a free service called Copyscape that analyzes a Web page and then uses Google's search engine to see whether the text is duplicated elsewhere on the Web -- Attributor's approach is seemingly more comprehensive.
I've seen Copyscape appear in my site logs before.
And I am curious as to how this process would work:
Attributor analyzes the content of clients, who could range from individuals to big media companies, using a technique known as “digital fingerprinting,” which determines unique and identifying characteristics of content. It uses these digital fingerprints to search its index of the Web for the content. The company claims to be able to spot a customer's content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video. It will provide customers with alerts and a dashboard of identified uses of their content on the Web and the context in which it is used.The content owners can then try to negotiate revenue from whoever is using it or request that it be taken down. In some cases, they may decide the content is being used fairly or to acceptable promotional ends. Attributor plans to help automate the interaction between content owners and those using their content on the Web, though it declines to specify how.
Tags: copyright, /media, /Technology
