Wild Web Gets New Sherriff

June 4, 2007: In an attempt to reign in problems with content theft in the wild west of the net, the Associated Press is kicking its online copyright protection services up a notch, using Attributor Corp.’s content tracking service to monitor how its stories and digital media is distributed.

A startup based in Silicon Valley’s Redwood City, Attributor’s system indexes web pages similar to a search engine. From here, companies like AP can perform detailed searches to track where content is appearing and see whether its use has been authorised or not.

According to an AP story on the deal, 13 billion pages have been indexed so far, creating a vast archive of sites to check for unlicensed content.

Copyright violation is an increasingly large problem online, and as more advertisers focus on the online arena offenders have been taking bigger chunks of revenue, drawing the ire of publishers and content producers.

Even with the extra control over its content AP claims that it does not want to drag offenders into court, preferring to negotiate licensing deals instead.

Scanning all of AP’s content (including images and digital video in the future) is a significant task, so for now the companies will be focussing on just a few hundred of the most popular stories a day. Aside from tracking copyright infringement, the system will also give AP much greater insight into how its content is used throughout the web, giving it an additional and valuable source of feedback.

“It's a very important feedback loop from one of the most important content producers in the world,” AP head and for Yahoo! executive Jim Brock told the news service.

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