Copyright tool being tested
From Wall Street Journal
Privately held Attributor Corp, based in Silicon Valley, has begun testing a system to scan the billions of pages on the Web for clients’ audio, video, images and text; potentially making it easier for owners to request that Web sites take content down or provide payment for its use.
The start-up, which was founded last year is emerging from the shadows at a time when some media and entertainment companies’ frustration with the difficulties of identifying infringing uses of their content online is increasing. The problem has intensified with the proliferation and increasing usage of sites such as Google’s YouTube, which lets consumers post video clips.
Media and entertainment companies have so far relied on a combination of technology and their own scanning to protect their content online — but with mixed results. Media companies have used digital-rights management technology designed to make it hard to copy or transfer files. But such measures have often proved to be clumsy, despised by consumers or quickly thwarted. That’s the case for DRM technology built into DVDs to prevent them from being ripped onto computers, for example. Entertainment and media companies have also relied on their own staff to scan Web sites for infringing content. But even when such content is spotted and taken down, the companies often see the content pop up in the same places or elsewhere soon after.
Though its service isn’t out yet, Attributor appears to go further than existing techniques for weeding out unauthorized uses of content online. It claims to have cracked the thorny computer-science problem of scouring the entire Web by using undisclosed technology to efficiently process and comb through chunks of content. The company says it will have over 10 billion Web pages in its index before the end of this month.
