Will they find this post?

by on November 5, 2007 · 8 comments

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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About Jerry Brito

Jerry Brito is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and director of its Technology Policy Program. He also serves as adjunct professor of law at GMU. His research focuses on technology and telecommunications policy, government transparency and accountability, and the regulatory process. Jerry is also a regular contributor to TIME.com's Techland. His personal web site is jerrybrito.com. You can follow him on Twitter and on Google+.

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  • http://mcgath.blogspot.com Gary McGath

    Measuring similarity between two documents in the general case is an extremely difficult problem. I wonder how they do it, and how well it really works.

  • http://mcgath.blogspot.com Gary McGath

    Measuring similarity between two documents in the general case is an extremely difficult problem. I wonder how they do it, and how well it really works.

  • http://www.jerrybrito.com Jerry Brito

    Yes, it’s fascinating. Another thing that occurred to me: if this technology is successful, we might see more instances of plagiarism uncovered.

  • http://jerrybrito.com Jerry Brito

    Yes, it’s fascinating. Another thing that occurred to me: if this technology is successful, we might see more instances of plagiarism uncovered.

  • http://linuxworld.com/community/ Don Marti

    Looks like it would be useful to keep spam bloggers from taking your text’s rightful Google juice. Techcrunch reports that they’ll report who is linking back and who isn’t.

  • http://linuxworld.com/community/ Don Marti

    Looks like it would be useful to keep spam bloggers from taking your text’s rightful Google juice. Techcrunch reports that they’ll report who is linking back and who isn’t.

  • http://bennett.com/blog Richard Bennett

    I wonder if the plagiarism meter would fire when newspaper editorial pages regurgitate press releases. That sort of thing happens all the time, of course.

  • http://bennett.com/blog Richard Bennett

    I wonder if the plagiarism meter would fire when newspaper editorial pages regurgitate press releases. That sort of thing happens all the time, of course.

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