Slashdot Mirror
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."
Anybody care to place a friendly wager that they're not going to honor robots.txt?
Can't they just use google or torrent sites?
If users can find items they want, presumably the copyright holders could use the same methods...
liqbase
"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?
Doesn't this merely serve to point out the absurdity of "Intellectual Property"?
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
127.0.0.1: $ cat robots.txt
# robots.txt for 127.0.0.1
# This file is copyright 2006 by me.
User-agent: AttributorCorporationDMCABot
Disallow: *
And if they do honor robots.txt, I'll be able to sue the fuckers for infringing on my copyright, because they must have read it in order to honor it.
Its purpose aside, yes, it would be a fantastic thing to be able to scan the entire web and reliably identify the context and content of any specific media file type. Video, audio, image, etc. Particularly if it could identify purposely obfuscated content.
I'm in what is almost certainly a tiny minority of Slashdotters in that I actually create copyrightable material rather than only consume it. I'm again in the minority in that I think copyrights are a good thing and again in the minority in that I can separate out the purpose of copyrights and the evil actions of the legal arms of **AA companies.
Regardless, while scanning the internet for improperly used material sounds great on paper this will probably end up being as effective as finding water with a divining rod. The current tactic of locking down things at the hardware and OS levels will get more support from the media companies, not that they seem all that good at choosing tactics when the internet is involved.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Attributor plans to help automate the interaction between content owners and those using their content on the Web, though it declines to specify how.
And apparently being written by underpants gnomes.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
But it looks like the real "innovation" these guys are pushing toward is fully automated filing of lawsuits. I think that was in Accelerando, which is fantastic, and which you can download it free.
It's not a dupe. (Unless you count anything that appears on Digg first to be a dupe.) However, it's also not the first story of its kind. About a gazillion companies have formed with the exact same business plan (save for the "hotness" at the time being digital music) and about a gazillion of those companies have failed to develop software that catches anything but the most obvious infractions.
Every so often, some RIAA/MPAA fair-haired boy manages to get funding for yet another attempt. He then fails miserably and the cycle repeats. You'd think the investors would learn. Unfortunately, they keep getting dazzled by the latest, buzzword-compliant technologies.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Let's take a fun legitimate site like, oh... Wikipedia:
(They also disallow certain specially generated pages like Special:Random, and any of the pages which actually let you edit the site).Let's see, what are some other sites? Ooh. Take a look at Slashdot's robots.txt! (disallows a variety of fun pages.) Microsoft's? How about whitehouse.gov? Google?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
As long as it respects basic internet rules of conduct (including respecting robots.txt), then this is ethically neutral.
It all depends on how it's used. Many companies would prefer to avoid coypyright infringing material, and will take it down if the existence is pointed out to them. Many companies will simply be asking others to remove material which clearly and flagrantly breaches their copyright. This is perfectly reasonable behaviour.
This may be much less helpful than its promoters claim.
First of all, what's the their probability of a false alarm? Even if they false alarm fairly infrequently, the vast amount of content on the Web means they could easily have a flood of false alarms, in addition to whatever actual copies are found. The user of the system is then going to have to have human beings sift through that flood to identify what's A) really a copy, B) whether that copy is infringing or not, and C) if so, is it worth taking action against the infringer?
The above may be more trouble/expense than it's worth in many cases.
Not that the RIAA always bothers to verify actual infringement has taken place before suing, but some organizations may be a little more ethical, or at least a little less trigger-happy.
...then do not put it to the Internet.
In fact, burn it to a DVD and lock it up to a safe, and never talk about it. That way nobody else will ever have access to your "intellectual property".
If the industry had their way, rap music would have never happened
I don't understand... your post seems to imply this is a Bad Thing?
http://blog.nexusuk.org
The editors could run this tool just on /. to check for dupes!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
And dynamic content is, of course, the answer. If I'm going to put up copyrighted content in the future, I'd use one of a dozen schemes that regenerate the download link on a per-session basis. Obviously they're not going to honour robots.txt, but why are your links readable by such a basic spider? You need to:
Anyone who follows the above steps (and most sites already do most or all of this) won't be found by the spider. Period.
The only thing I can think of that this product would be useful for is to find people who have blatantly copied my website, but I'm sure you could find those people equally easily with Google.
mandelbr0t
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
and whenever I go out, the FBI begins to shout Title 17 U.S.C...
I'm bothered by this type of scenario:
"Dear [webmaster]:
It has come to our attention that your website, [sh*touttaluck.com], does not meet compliance in terms of a variety of copyright laws of the United States and other countries. Infractions indicated by our software include, but are not limited to:
Images created with an unregistered copy of Adobe Photoshop
Flash files created with an unregistered copy of Macromedia Studio MX 2004
PDFs created with an unregistered copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional
Content and structure created with an unregistered copy of Macromedia Studio MX 2004
Content and structure created with an unregistered copy of Microsoft Office Frontpage 2003
Images created with an unregistered copy of . . . "
...starting to see what I'm going with? I understand they're likely talking about copyrighted content such as prior art images or mp3 files, or maybe even damaging company secrets that are leaked by a whistleblower, and then redistributed for the intent of airing dirty laundry, but I'm thinking about the structure of a page itself. A person group or company who solicits a webpage to be created by a web design studio would now have to ensure that the studio itself is in compliance, or the products they use to create the pages are legal. That's where I get all nervous.
I've experienced this from both sides.
I have a bunch of my books on the web, and every once in a while I do a search on some text from my own books to see who else is mirroring them. The books happen to be copylefted (dual-licensed GFDL/CC-BY-SA), but I'd like to know who's mirroring them, and check whether they're violating the license. A lot of people just seem to be hoarding the PDF files on their university servers, maybe because they're afraid my web site will disappear; that's flattering. One guy was selling them on CDs on e-bay, violating my license (claimed they were PD, didn't propagate the license). Another guy translated them to html, with lots of errors, changed the license to a more restrictive one, and put his own ads up; he fixed the licensing violation when I complained, and in a way it was a good thing, because it motivated me to make my own html versions (which are now bringing me a significant amount of money from adsense every month). One kind of annoying thing about mirroring is that the people who are mirroring never bother to update their mirrors, but in general I just figure there's no such thing as bad publicity :-)
From the other side, I once received an e-mail from a museum in the UK that was complaining that I was using a 17th century oil painting of Isaac Newton. I guess they own the original, and they may also have been the ones who did the scan that I found in a google image search, but under U.S. law (Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp.), a realistic reproduction of a PD two-dimensional art work is not copyrightable. What really surprised me was that they came across it at all, because at that time I think my book was only in PDF format, and hadn't been indexed by google because the file size was too big.
The whole thing doesn't seem negative to me in general. It makes just as much sense as people doing a vanity search in Google before they apply for a job, or authors watching their amazon.com sales rankings obsessively. I guess the most obvious potential for abuse would be if they send a nastygram to your webhost, and your webhost is a low-end one that figures it's not worth their time to keep your account, so they just shut off your account.
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