Earlier in this week I had an interview with Rich Pearson of Attributor, the site that hopes to alleviate the problem of online plagiarism. Today he was kind enough to walk me through the product. Here is a closer look at Attributor, told through the magic of screenshots.


Attributor


This is the sites Dashboard. As a publisher you will have access to information on how many pieces of your content has been copied, how many copies have been made, whose doing the copying and just how much copying is being done. In short, you will have almost complete access to your content’s distribution chain.


Catch The Copiers

Dig a little deeper and you can learn about individual articles and individual copiers. What you don’t see pictured is that you are actually show many words were copied, what percentage of the text the copied portion represents and whether the site copying your content is monetizing it.

What really blew me away about this view was the level of detail. On one screen, you could actually see which Ad networks the copying site was using the monetize. Just from a competitive research standpoint, these kinds of metrics are impressive.


Take Action

Attributor gives you three choices of actions to take against the copiers ranging from requesting a link to issuing in DMCA takedown notice. You can take care of all of this from within the dashboard.

Better yet, Attributor also allows you to attack the most frustrating sploggers where they are the most vulnerable — their wallet. Along with warnings, Attributor will also let you send de-indexing requests to Google and will inform the ad networks working with the blogs about their infringement.


Copy . . . Right?

This image illustrates the scope of the problem. Highlighted in yellow is the content of an “unnamed publisher” who has had an entire post stolen word for word by this site. The person running this site is making money off of the Adsense around it and didn’t even have the courtesy of providing a link back.


Web 2.0 Roundup

A few questions still need to be resolved before Attributor can really take off. The first is how receptive will publishers who are stealing content be to anything short of a DMCA takedown?

The second is the delicate question of how do you encourage engines like Google to work with with a company that wants to clean up their index. Remember that every splog that runs Adsense is providing inventory and ad revenue for Google. By taking a truly decisive step to eliminate them, Google would have to accept a significant short term lose of income. While the company would never openly admit it, this would be a serious consideration when deciding whether to sign on with Attributor.

These main problems aside, Attributor has the potential to change the way online publishing operates. Even if they can’t get plagiarists to play nice, if they can get Google to de-index them, most of the battle has already been won. Right now they are working exclusively with large publishers to test the concept behind the idea, I can’t wait to see what things will look like when they start letting the rest of us into the mix.

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