Q&A: Attributor discusses Fair Use, DMCA take-downs

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:32:17 -0700

Attributor is a name that went a little bit unnoticed in the AP vs. Drudge Retort tiff last month. The company provides a service that allows content producers to scan the Internet for copies of their content, then contact the owner of the site using the content and negotiate an agreement.

I had the opportunity to talk with Rich Pearson, Attributor's vice president of marketing, about the company's services and how they hope clients (who include the AP, Reuters, and Conde Nast) will use Attributor in dealing with the changing scope of Web content.

Where does Attributor draw the line on Fair Use?

We don't actually make any Fair Use determination; instead, we're focused on providing our customers full visibility on which sites are re-using their content and in what context so they can make a Fair Use determination.

If you determine that use of something does not fall under Fair Use, what steps are taken?

Specifically, here's what we find and report back with regard to the four factors of Fair Use.

1) The amount of an article or video that has been re-used. For text, we highlight the copied text and express this as number of words copied and % of the original article. For video, we break down by seconds and show a thumbnail of the copied video.

2) Commerciality. For each page that we crawl, we detect if an ad is present and report back as a commercial match if we find re-use on this page.

3) Audience: To help customers understand impact of the re-use, we currently show the traffic for each match site. We will shortly be launching a feature that estimates the audience page views and allows the customer to associate cpm data to understand revenue.

4) Attribution: We help convey info about the purpose and character of a use by whether or not attribution is provided. This can either be text attibution (e.g. "by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira") or a link back to the original source (http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/14/are-email-newsletters-new-bla...). Because search engine ranking depends largely on links, we believe our service can make the link economy a reality, particularly when we launch our blogger-focused service. You can see more details on our view here.

Do you have any customers who have already dealt with the negative repercussions of sending DMCA notices?

Sorry for the stock answer, but I can't really go into details on any customer specific issues the AP issue is public record, so I can point you to it.

How can Attributor help companies repair any PR damage they may have suffered?

As spelled out above, we believe our role is to add objectivity to the Fair Use determination process as well as provide publishers with the tools to turn re-use into opportunity that fits their business model. To that end, we provide publishers with three possible actions to take with our platform: 1) License Offer: to initiate a licensing discussion or point to licensing terms; 2) Link Request: Secure a link and proper attribution to drive search engine ranking; 3) Removal Notice: this is an electronic DMCA notice sent under penalty of perjury that can be sent to the content host, the search engines or the ad networks. The latter two removal options are "lighter-weight" removals in that the content stays up but it is removed from search engine indices or ads removed from the pages.

Pearson acknowledges that links back do far more for a company's search engine ranking and visibility than they are often given credit for, and adds that a DMCA notice can lead to much more of the wrong kind of attention for a company in the form of negative publicity (as the AP discovered).

More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:

Analysis: AP's Jim Kennedy discusses blogs, Fair Use
News: Bloggers to AP: I got your feed right here
News: AP targets bloggers over story excerpts