Web Applications

Network World's Web Applications Newsletter, 10/31/07

Watching for content abuse

By Mark Gibbs

One of the problems for online content owners is controlling their property. If you have lots of content that you want people to associate with you to generate page views, then you’ll want it quoted in articles, mentioned in blogs, pointed to by Web pages, and so on. What you don’t want is for it to be reprinted beyond reasonable quoting, reused without attribution and or permission, or pirated.

A service now in beta that addresses these problems is Attributer. Attributor “fingerprints” your content and then spiders Web sites looking for where your property is reused.

From there Attributor allows you to analyze what percentage of your original content has been copied; whether ads are present; sees how much traffic the site receives; and determines whether there is a link back to you. What is particularly useful about this data is that it allows you to check whether re-use license terms are being complied with.

For sites that aren’t in compliance with your reuse terms and conditions, Attributor gives you the data to determine to what extent the infringing site might be making money from your content (obviously the cornerstone to litigation and revenue recovery) and provides automated generation of DMCA “Takedown” notices.

Attributor conducted an interesting study using their content fingerprinting technology by looking at the abuse of recipes. They used content from three sites, Epicurious.com, Allrecipes.com and RachaelRayMag.com and looked for content that duplicated 50% or more of the original text.

Attributor found an amazing 10,000 unauthorized copies, of which more than 60% had no attribution. A particularly interesting observation was that copied and reposted recipes were often higher ranked in search engine results than the original content.

An article on CNET covers the Attributor recipe study and notes that “The traffic Epicurious and Allrecipes are losing to other sites translates to lost annual revenue of $1.6 million for Epicurious and $3.1 million for Allrecipes.”

Attributor’s first publicly announced customers include The Associated Press and Reuters, and once the beta period ends (a date yet to be announced) the company plans to offer their service to any content owner interested. Pricing is not yet established.

Editor's note: Starting the week of Nov. 12, you will notice a number of enhancements to Network World newsletters that will provide you with more resources and more news links relevant to the newsletter's subject. Beginning 'Monday, Nov. 12, the Web Applications Newsletter, written by Mark Gibbs, will be merged with the Network Applications News Alert and will be named the Web Applications Alert. You'll get Mark's Web apps pick of the day, which you will be able to read in full at NetworkWorld.com, plus links to the day's network applications news and other relevant resources. This Alert will be mailed on Mondays and Wednesdays. We hope you will enjoy the enhancements and we thank you for reading Network World newsletters.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist and now blogger: Check out Gibbsblog.

Gibbs not only pens (well, keyboards) this newsletter he also writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World. We’ll spare you the rest of the bio but if you want to know more, go here

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