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Web Copyright Crackdown On the Way
Hugh Pickens writes "Journalist Alan D. Mutter reports on his blog 'Reflections of a Newsosaur' that a coalition of traditional and digital publishers is launching the first-ever concerted crackdown on copyright pirates on the Web. Initially targeting violators who use large numbers of intact articles, the first offending sites to be targeted will be those using 80% or more of copyrighted stories more than 10 times per month. In the first stage of a multi-step process, online publishers identified by Silicon Valley startup Attributor will be sent a letter informing them of the violations and urging them to enter into license agreements with the publishers whose content appears on their sites. In the second stage Attributor will ask hosting services to take down pirate sites. 'We are not going after past damages' from sites running unauthorized content says Jim Pitkow, the chief executive of Attributor. The emphasis, Pitkow says is 'to engage with publishers to bring them into compliance' by getting them to agree to pay license fees to copyright holders in the future. Offshore sites will not be immune from the crackdown: almost all of them depend on banner ads served by US-based services, and the DMCA requires the ad service to act against any violator. Attributor says it can interdict the revenue lifeline at any offending site in the world." One possible weakness in Attributor's business plan, unless they intend to violate the robots.txt convention: they find violators by crawling the Web.
Since, as you say, robots.txt will likely do nothing against them, the bigger question becomes "how do they plan to do their crawling?". Crawling from a well defined IP block, using software with user agent Attributor_copy_cop, will be laughably simple to block or present false noninfringing content to.
Spoofing the UA strings and(if necessary) some of the behavior of common web browsers is a simple software problem, so I assume that they'll do that(unless they are terminally incompetent). Out of curiosity, though, does anybody know how easy and cheap it would be (using legitimate methods not botnet style stuff) for such a commercial entity to obtain a reasonably large number of, ideally "residential looking", IPs that change fairly often? Do you just call verizon and say "I want 500 residential DSL lines brought out to so-and-so location"? Would you obtain the services of one of the sleazy datacenter operators who caters to spammers and the like and knows how to switch IP blocks frequently? Do you pay to have second lines installed at your employee's houses, with company scanner boxes attached?
I've had an experience with Attributor myself, and it's given me a pretty low opinion of them. I'm the author of a CC-BY-SA-licensed calculus textbook, titled "Calculus." Someone posted a copy of the pdf on Scribd, as allowed by the license. So one day I got an email from one of the people who runs Scribd, saying that Attributor had sent them a takedown notice, which they were skeptical about. Attributor hadn't supplied any useful information about what they thought was a violation. I called Scribd, and they checked and said it was a mistake -- they were working for Macmillan, which publishes another book titled "Calculus." So here they were, serving a DMCA notice under penality of perjury, and they hadn't even checked whether the name of the author was the same, or whether any of the text was the same. Their bot just found that the title, "Calculus," was the same as the title of one of their client's books. Pretty scummy.
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