Publishers See a Way to Track Their Content Across the Net

Copyrighted work like a news article or a picture can hop between Web sites as easily as a cut-and-paste command. But more than ever, as that material finds new audiences, the original sources might not get the direct financial benefit — in fact, they might have little idea where their work has spread.

A young company called Attributor says it has an answer, and a number of big publishers of copyrighted material say Attributor just might be right.

The company has developed software that identifies an electronic “fingerprint” for a particular piece of material — an article, a picture, a video. Then it hunts down any place across the Web where a significant chunk of that work has been copied, with or without permission.

When the use is unauthorized, Attributor’s software can automatically send a message to the site’s operators, demanding a link back to the original publisher’s site, a share of revenue from any ads on the page, or a halt to the copying.

The Associated Press and Reuters, each of which publishes thousands of pieces of material each day, are among the company’s clients, and a number of large magazines and newspapers have been in talks with Attributor. Executives at both wire services said they were still adapting the software to their needs and deciding how to respond to its findings, but they do not doubt it will have some long-term value.

“For the first time, we now have a consistent way of getting this data and knowing what actually happens to our product, rather just ad hoc reports,” said Srinandan R. Kasi, vice president and general counsel for The Associated Press, which has used the software for several months.

For newspapers and magazines, financial survival increasingly means raising traffic on their Web sites and revenue from online ads. Executives of some major publishers, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss their talks with Attributor, said they were somewhat optimistic that such software can help.

“There are probably thousands of examples every year where our stuff gets copied without authorization,” a newspaper company executive said. “The ad revenue they get from it might not be much, but if each of those just gives a link back to our original, that could be a significant amount of traffic.”

Attributor, based in the San Francisco area, was founded last year by Jim Brock and Jim Pitkow, veteran executives of technology companies. Mr. Brock, the chief executive officer, was a senior vice president at Yahoo. Mr. Pitkow, the chief technology officer, has a doctorate in computer science and has headed other technology companies.

Source: NYT