Copyright Tool Scans Web For Violations

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a tech start-up that proposes to offer the ultimate in assurance for content owners. Attributor Corporation is going to offer clients the ability to scan the web for their own intellectual property. The article touches on previous use of techniques like DRM and in-house staff searches, and the limited usefulness of both. They specifically cite the pending legal actions against companies like YouTube, and wonder about what their attitude will be towards initiatives like this. From the article: "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."

Comments

Wager

[Baricom]

Anybody care to place a friendly wager that they're not going to honor robots.txt?

buh

[lucky130]

"as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video"

Like quotations in a paper, or video snippets in an educational presentation?

Re:buh

[NeutronCowboy]

You're assuming anyone is going to manually verify any of the results. From my experience with people using monitoring software (especially non-techies who are simply consumers of the technology, but who provided the money for it), the vast majority of them are simply going to call their lawyers when they see the dashboard light up. I see vast letter writing campaigns come from this, with little actual infringing being prosecuted.

This is a scary product. Not so much because of the technology behind it, but because of how it is going to be implemented and (ab)used.

Fighting an avalanche with a snow shovel

[TheWoozle]

Doesn't this merely serve to point out the absurdity of "Intellectual Property"?

Some interesting questions...

[PingSpike]

Great, now all the torrent sites will require captcha verification too! ;P

Actually, can they even scan torrents without downloading the entire file? And whats to stop everyone from just blocking them from accessing their websites? Are they going to go in covertly, pretending to be actual users? I can see every legit website blocking their access as well, why pay for bandwidth to supply that?

Sure, youtube can be more efficiently attacked...but youtube has been dancing in front of the cannons since its inception, we all knew it was going to get shot eventually.

Re:Yeah

[jedidiah]

There's a wide gulf between copyright being a good idea in concept and being sensibly implemented in it's current form.

Not everyone that creates content thinks that draconian enforcement attempts are a good idea, or even in the best interests of those that create content.

If your work can't survive in the marketplace, which includes the prospect of everyone on the planet getting to use it for free, then perhaps you should get some sort of more conventional day job.

The difference between a game that sells 50K and one that sells 5 Million has nothing to do with DRM.