Startup technology developer Attributor is expanding tests of its anti-piracy services, which monitor, respond to – and potentially even monetize – the unauthorized use of publishers’ content.
The company recently began a trial of its FairShare service, which Attributor says will provide publishers with a means to collect advertising revenues on content that is published outside of fair use guidelines on another site. Attributor is working with leading ad networks and its existing publishing partners to determine ways to monetize this unlicensed content if it is not removed voluntarily, according to Stephan Thomsen, the company’s general manager.
The FairShare trial is now running in parallel with testing of the company’s Guardian service, which monitors the use of publishers’ content for possible infringement. When the service is offered commercially, Attributor plans to charge an annual fee based on the reach and size of the publisher, according to Thomsen. Attributor is testing Guardian with about 25 newspaper and magazine publishers, he said.
Attributor’s goal is not to get websites to take down unauthorized content, but to get offending websites to pony up for their usage. The company explained its approach in a recent (unsigned) post to its corporate blog:
We want to be completely clear: this model is NOT about content removal. The new model IS about the economics of online content. Our initiative focuses on changing the economic benefits of using unlicensed content and doing so in a manner that strives to do as much as possible to seek an acceptable outcome before removing the content or changing the online experience for consumers. … This is about the economy of content and the ads that support it, not the content itself.
Attributor’s steps to an acceptable outcome begin with an email to the website owner identifying the content that is being used in full without permission. (Attributor identifies “full-copy use” as any page that contains more than 80% of the original article and is at least 125 words long.) During the trial phase, Thomsen said 85% of the offending parties have either responded to the initial email or removed the unauthorized content.
For companies that don’t respond, Attributor follows an escalation plan – a second email, followed by actions to remove the offending page from search engines and remove advertising from the page (as required by the U.S. government’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (pdf, see page 13).
Unauthorized use of content has been a persistent problem since the emergence of RSS technology, which made content scraping a breeze. Attributor analysis from last fall found that during one 30-day period in October and November, more than 75,000 websites reused at least one U.S. newspaper article without a license – accounting for 112,000 “near exact” copies. An additional 163,173 excerpts were found.
In a subsequent report, Attributor tracked the content of 133 U.S. magazines across 20 sites that it had identified as frequent infringers. Over a one-week period in March, the company verified 3,996 instances of downloadable, full issues of the magazines on these sites, affecting 84 of the 133 magazines - an average of 48 infringements for each of the 84 titles.
