The New York Times reports on Attributor, a company tackling the broad re-use of copyrighted material online:
The company has developed software that identifies an electronic “fingerprint” for a particular piece of material — an article, a picture, a video. Then it hunts down any place across the Web where a significant chunk of that work has been copied, with or without permission.
When the use is unauthorized, Attributor’s software can automatically send a message to the site’s operators, demanding a link back to the original publisher’s site, a share of revenue from any ads on the page, or a halt to the copying.
No word on whether the software also calculates whether unauthorized uses it finds are nevertheless fair uses. That aside, this sort of searching technology should help placate the fears of content owners over the sort of orphan works legislation I’ve proposed.
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