Attributor
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| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet, Software |
| Founder(s) | Jim Pitkow, Jim Brock |
| Key people | Jim Pitkow (CEO, co-founder) Matt Robinson (President and General Counsel) Htin Hlaing (VP of Engineering) Erik Hogan (VP Products) Christoph Brem (VP Global Sales) |
| Website | www.attributor.com |
Attributor is a provider of digital content protection for the publishing industry. Its products enable publishers to identify and verify copy infringement, enforce authorized use, analyze market demand and monetize digital content.
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[edit] Features
Its three main products are "Guardian", to detect infringement, "Insight", to track demand, and "Fairnotice", to notify infringers and obtain payment.[1] The products and services scale for use by large publishers and individual authors including book, news and magazine, and financial publishers. The products address digital content supply, distribution and demand. The systems crawls tens to hundreds of millions of pages per day and have indexed tens of billions of pages since inception.
[edit] Criticisms
One critic asserts that Attributor's web crawler ignores the robots exclusion standard and spoofs its user agent string. This is common, and arguably necessary, for Internet monitors, but webmasters may choose to block it more aggressively.[2]
The company states that its FairShare crawlers honor the robots exclusion standard and identify the user agent string clearly.[3]
[edit] History
Attributor was founded in 2005[4] by Jim Brock and Jim Pitkow with seed funding from Selby Ventures, Draper Richards, First Round Capital, Amicus Capital, Ron Conway and other angel investors. In December 2006 Sigma Partners lead the Series B investment with participating from the existing investors.[5] In April 2008, it then received Series C funding totaling $12 Million, led by JAFCO Ventures with participation from Turner Broadcasting and previous investors.[6]
In April 2009, Attributor and more than 1,000 publishing companies founded the Fair Syndication Consortium, the goal of which is to establish a new model for online content syndication.[7][8]
Randall Stross from the New York Times reported that Attributor’s search for e-book copies of “The Lost Symbol” verified that 166 copies of the e-book were available on 11 sites. RapidShare accounted for 102.[9]
In December 2009, Attributor and the Fair Syndication Consortium released research data on the proliferation of U.S. newspaper content, which found that throughout a 30-day period, more than 75,000 unlicensed sites reused U.S. newspaper content online. According to the study, on these sites, 112,000 near-exact copies of unlicensed articles were detected.[10]
Attributor’s FairShare Guardian service monitored 913 books in 14 subjects in the final quarter of 2009 and estimated that more than 9 million copies of books were illegally downloaded from the 25 sites it tracked.
In April 2010, Attributor reported on online magazine infringement.[citation needed] The research looked at a segment of the magazine industry: 133 English language magazine titles, and the infringement that occurs on just 20 of the more than 2,000 domains that illegally host full-issue downloads of these magazines. Among the results, Attributor found 3,996 instances of downloadable, full issues of these 133 magazines on these 20 sites, and 84 of the 133 (63%) magazines had infringements.
Following the magazine report, Attributor produced an Ad Server Report[citation needed] in May 2010 that analyzed those that monetize content across 270 million domains, which is nearly 75% more domains and pages covered than in previous studies. Most notably, Google and DoubleClick overwhelmingly dominated the market, combining for more than 65% of the market share, which compared to the December 2008 report, is an increase of about 9%.
In October 2010, Attributor released a research report on online book piracy,[citation needed] indicating that publishers could be losing out on as much as $3 billion to online book piracy. In November 2010, Attributor released the results of its Graduated Response Trial which showed that the majority of sites contacted were willing to license content or remove it.
In May 2011, the company released some statistics on the percentage of content hosted on P2P networks vs Cyberlockers and found cyberlockers to have a much larger percentage of pirated content.[citation needed] Attributor typically comes out with new research on a quarterly basis.[where?]
[edit] See also
- Plagiarism detection
- Search engine optimization
- Content marketing
- Article marketing
- Intellectual property
- Copyright Infringement
- Digital Millennium Copyright Act
- Web Syndication
[edit] References
- ^ "Products". Attributor.com.
- ^ Burkard, Johann (12 March 2008)."Attributor: Abuse other people’s resources with confidence". johannburkard.de
- ^ FairShare Support FAQ. Attributor.com
- ^ Delaney, Kevin J. (December 18, 2008). "Copyright Tool Will Scan Web For Violations". Wall Street Journal.
- ^ Marshall, Matt (December 18, 2006). "Attributor scans web for copyright violations". VentureBeat.
- ^ Olsen, Stefanie (April 2, 2008). "Content-tracking software gets $12 million cash infusion". CNET.com.
- ^ Saba, Jennifer (July 23, 2009). "Fair Syndication Consortium Adds to Publisher Pool". AdWeek.com.
- ^ "Graduated Response Trial Unmasks a Cooperative Internet". FairSyndication.org blog. November 6, 2010.
- ^ Stross, Randall (October 3, 2009). "Will Books Be Napsterized?". New York Times
- ^ "U.S. Newspaper Content Reuse Study". FairSyndication.org blog. December 1, 2009.
