[Infowarrior] - Copyright Tool Will Scan Web for Violations

[Richard Forno]

Copyright Tool Will Scan Web for Violations
http://www.freepress.net/news/19837

>From Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2006
By Kevin J. Delaney

To deal with the mounting copyright issues swirling around video and other
content online, a start-up founded by some respected Silicon Valley
executives is taking a novel approach: combing the entire Web for
unauthorized uses.

Privately held Attributor Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., has begun testing a
system to scan the billions of pages on the Web for clients¹ 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 and has been in ³stealth² mode, is
emerging into the public eye today, at a time when some media and
entertainment companies¹ frustration with difficulties identifying
infringing uses of their content online is increasing. The problem has
intensified with the proliferation and increasing usage of sites such as
Google Inc.¹s 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. That¹s 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.

³We all know that as soon as somebody comes up with a way to secure a piece
of property, somebody else will come within days and crack it,² says
Lawrence Iser, a partner at law firm Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert
in Santa Monica, Calif., who represents musical artists and other
entertainment industry clients.

Though its service isn¹t out yet, Attributor appears to go further than
existing techniques for weeding out unauthorized uses of content online.
While companies are tackling parts of the same problem ‹ Indigo Stream
Technologies Ltd., based in Gibraltar, offers a free service called
Copyscape that analyzes a Web page and then uses Google¹s search engine to
see whether the text is duplicated elsewhere on the Web ‹ Attributor¹s
approach is seemingly more comprehensive.

Its co-founders, former Yahoo Inc. executive Jim Brock, and Jim Pitkow, a
Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has sold companies to Google and VeriSign
Inc., claim 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.

³If it works, it¹s a fantastic invention,² Mr. Iser says.

It¹s unclear whether such a service will be welcomed by Internet companies
that allow users to post content. YouTube, News Corp.¹s MySpace and others
already face copyright lawsuits. In some cases, they¹re building systems to
identify pirated materials consumers upload to their sites, and say they¹re
open to sharing revenue with content owners.

Attributor plans to announce today that it has received about $10 million in
funding to date from investors including Sigma Partners, Selby Venture
Partners, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus Capital.

Attributor analyzes the content of clients, who could range from individuals
to big media companies, using a technique known as ³digital fingerprinting,²
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 customer¹s 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.

Company executives believe its system will provide transparency and
accountability to encourage more owners to put their content online with
confidence they¹ll be able to police its use, and share in any profits.

³We believe that we can provide an infrastructure that will support all
kinds of outcomes and remedies, which will align the interests of content
owners, content hosts and search engines around legitimate syndication and
monetization,² says Mr. Brock, Attributor¹s chief executive.

³We see this as a way to take us out of the course we¹ve been on, which is
more litigation,² says Mr. Pitkow, who is chief technology officer.

Attributor has begun testing the system, and won¹t release it officially
until the first quarter of next year. The co-founders¹ track records,
however, lend credibility to their claims. As Yahoo¹s first outside counsel,
Mr. Brock tackled Internet copyright issues for the Internet company as far
back as 1994 and later oversaw some of its core businesses as a senior vice
president. Mr. Pitkow is a computer science Ph.D. who worked at Xerox¹s
legendary PARC research facility. In 2001, he helped to sell the
intellectual property of Outride Inc., where he was president and chairman,
to Google. Last year, he sold Moreover Technologies, where he was CEO and
chairman, to VeriSign.

³They¹re real guys who have solved hard-core problems,² says Ali Aydar,
chief operating officer of Snocap Inc., a digital-music registry start-up.
Snocap and Attributor share a backer in Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway.
³Content owners I¹ve talked to outside of the music business would love a
system which tells them where their content is being utilized,² Mr. Aydar
adds.

Attributor executives decline to say how frequently they will update their
Web index, a key factor in their ability to stay on top of postings. They
also say they won¹t at least initially monitor peer-to-peer file swapping
systems, where large amounts of pirated music, movies, TV shows and software
are traded.

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