Beyond Copyrights Protection

In my post "Understanding Trademarks and Copyrights", I discussed basic concepts. Even if you're willing to pay $45 to register every piece of your creation with the Electronic Copyright Office of The Library of Congress, how would you find out who makes illegal copies of your work?

It is neither feasible nor practical hoping to identify offending contents or websites simply by having YouTube employ a group of staffs eye-browsing the uploaded videos. To make the problem even worse, there are many types of media files ranging from text, image, music, to video.

Technology seems to show glimmers of hope finally. A week ago, I came across a new start-up called Attributor that is currently developing a new generation of technology that helps police the content over the Internet. Here is how it works:

1. The content creator registers the original content with Attributor.
2. Attributor screens and indexes over 100 million web pages a day.
3. Attributor detects the copies of the content and the offending web sites.
4. Attributot also generates reports with details of the offending websites, such as, whether or not an attribution link back to the original web site exists, the web site traffic, the advertising revenues, and so on.

Attributor is shooting beyond copyrights protection, though. The reports allow the content creator to take proper actions. One simple action could be to require the offending web site to include an attribution link back to the original site. Not only does the attribution link improve authority of the original web site (e.g. Google PageRank), but would also bring in additional traffic. Other actions include removal of the offending content, blockage of the offending web site by the search engines, negotiating a share of the advertising revenue, or legal actions.