[Infowarrior] - First web copyright crackdown coming

[Richard Forno]

First web copyright crackdown coming
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2010/03/first-web-copyright-crackdown-coming.html

A coalition of traditional and digital publishers this month will  
launch the first-ever concerted crackdown on copyright pirates on the  
web, initially targeting violators who use large numbers of intact  
articles.


Details of the crackdown were provided by Jim Pitkow, the chief  
executive of Attributor, a Silicon Valley start-up that has been  
selected as the agent for several publishers who want to be  
compensated by websites that are using their content without paying  
licensing fees.


In a telephone interview yesterday, Pitkow declined to identify the  
individual publishers in his coalition, but said they include “about a  
dozen” organizations representing wire services, traditional print  
publishers and “top-tier blog networks.”


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 aimed at encouraging  
copyright compliance instead of punishing scofflaws, Pitkow said  
online publishers identified by his company 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.


If copyright pirates refuse to pay, Attributor will request the major  
search engines to remove offending pages from search results and will  
ask banner services to stop serving ads to pages containing  
unauthorized content. The search engines and ad services are required  
to immediately honor such requests by the federal Digital Millennium  
Copyright Act (DMCA).


If the above efforts fail, Attributor will ask hosting services to  
take down pirate sites. Because hosting services face legal liability  
under the DCMA if they do not comply, they will act quickly, said  
Pitkow.


“We are not going after past damages” from sites running unauthorized  
content said Pitkow. The emphasis, he said 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.


License fees, which are set by each of the individual organizations  
producing content, may range from token sums for a small publisher to  
several hundred dollars for yearlong rights to a piece from a major  
publisher, said Pitkow.


Attributor identifies copyright violators by scraping the web to find  
copyrighted content on unauthorized sites. A team of investigators  
will contact violators in an effort to bring them into compliance or,  
alternatively, begin taking action under DMCA.


Offshore sites will not be immune from the crackdown, said Pitkow,  
because almost all of them depend on banner ads served by U.S.-based  
services. Because 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.


Attributor already has been engaged by several major book publishers  
to get unauthorized eBooks off unauthorized sites. “And we have 99%  
success rate,” he said.