Attributor is a system designed to combat the problem of online plagiarism. The team is working to give publishers the tools to track how their content is being used, and enable them to take the fight back to the sploggers. I recently had a chance to talk to Rich Pearson, Senior Director of Marketing at Attributor. Here’s what he had to say.

me: What is the mission of Attributor? I know you are trying to stop the rampant plagiarism in the blogosphere but how are you attacking the problem?

Attributor

Rich: The mission is to allow anyone who publishes content online to get “full value” for it
The definition of “Full value” depends on the individual and what they want to achieve with their content. Ultimately, we want to enable a marketplace for content – something that can’t happen unless content creators have visibility into how and where their content is spread across the net and some level of accountability if someone takes it without permission that’s pretty high level.

me: I guess what I am most interested in are some of the tools that you are using to help enable this marketplace. How are you “catching the crooks,” for instance?

Rich: Web-wide visibility is the first and perhaps most critical tool. In addition to telling you the number of sites copying your content, we will tell you the % that has been copied, how many have ads, how many did or did not link back to your site and finally which rank higher than you in search engines We allow the content owner to act upon copying in one of 4 ways –

1) Do nothing and just learn which articles are getting copied most and by which types of sites.

2) Request the copying site to add a link back to your site and/or provide text attribution “from How to split an atom,” Because links have so much power in determining search rank, we believe this will be a critical tool.

3) Request a revenue share or license agreement.

4) Send a Takedown request

Fighting The Bot-Nets

me: How effective have efforts like this been against the worst spammers, the bot-nets? It would seem to me like it would be difficult to track down anyone to contact it these cases.

Rich: Attributor will pull in the contact information to enable the latter 3 actions and also monitor how they respond. True, some spammers will be very difficult to pin down – especially those living overseas. When a takedown notice is sent, we also send a request to the search engines and ad networks so the spammer no longer appears in the index and the ads are no longer placed on the page.

me: Interesting. So, what do you do about the possibility of false positives. Specifically in the case of small publishers, it seems like it would be easy to claim rights over content that isn’t yours.

Rich: That’s a tough issue for sure – we’ll have a couple of ways to combat abuse. First, anyone who sends a takedown notice will have to electronically sign a legal notice claiming that the content is indeed theirs and they will be subject to prosecution if the notice is being
sent without warrant. We’ll also employ content ownership verification methods – initially, credit card, google-webmaster like file upload. A small percentage of abuse seems inevitable, but we’re going to be very transparent about how we handle it.

Target Market

me: That seems like the best way to handle these things. So are you services mostly geared towards large publishers (the Engadgets of the world), or could a small blogger gain some value from it?

Rich: For the rest of 2007, we’re focused on the larger publishers but we’ll be launching individual publisher service in early ‘08 at prices where anyone can subscribe. We will eventually also have a free service with limited functionality – think of it as a ‘claim your content’ type registry across the web prices aren’t final but will be between $5 and $10 a month.

me: So you are trying, in a small way, to provide an unique identifier for pieces of web content. A little bit like an ISBN number in print media?

Rich: Yes, sort of – we don’t modify the content at all, but conceptually, it’s right on. Our customers definitely view this as a way to create a sort of content vending machine where licensing is on a per use basis and, eventually both parties could use Attributor to determine licensing payments.

Web 2.0 Roundup

me: So tell me, from working in this space — just how bad is this problem?

Rich: for text, it is very bad. The first step in our sales process is to show our potential customers the number of matches . . . let’s just say that we have yet to surprise a customer on this surprise, meaning underdeliver. Less experience on images, but early data shows that the “right-click” action is used greatly.

I would like to thank Rich for stopping by to talk to us. Attributor represents a new model in online citation. I’ll be watching this system closely to see how well it delivers on its promise.

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