<incom> Copyright Tool Will Scan Web For Violations

[Soenke Zehle]

Copyright Tool
Will Scan Web
For Violations
By KEVIN J. DELANEY
December 18, 2006; Page B1

<http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116640468524853020-jD46fkyB33ZgQiMfJcpSZ4LqgLA_20071218.html?mod=blogs>

To deal with the mounting copyright issues swirling around video and 
other content online, a start-up founded by some respected Silicon 
Valley executives is taking a novel approach: combing the entire Web for 
unauthorized uses.

Privately held Attributor Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., has begun 
testing a system to scan the billions of pages on the Web for clients' 
audio, video, images and text -- potentially making it easier for owners 
to request that Web sites take content down or provide payment for its use.

The start-up, which was founded last year and has been in "stealth" 
mode, is emerging into the public eye today, at a time when some media 
and entertainment companies' frustration with difficulties identifying 
infringing uses of their content online is increasing. The problem has 
intensified with the proliferation and increasing usage of sites such as 
Google Inc.'s YouTube, which lets consumers post video clips.

Media and entertainment companies have so far relied on a combination of 
technology and their own scanning to protect their content online -- but 
with mixed results. Media companies have used digital-rights management 
technology designed to make it hard to copy or transfer files. But such 
measures have often proved to be clumsy, despised by consumers or 
quickly thwarted. That's the case for DRM technology built into DVDs to 
prevent them from being ripped onto computers, for example. 
Entertainment and media companies have also relied on their own staff to 
scan Web sites for infringing content. But even when such content is 
spotted and taken down, the companies often see the content pop up in 
the same places or elsewhere soon after.

"We all know that as soon as somebody comes up with a way to secure a 
piece of property, somebody else will come within days and crack it," 
says Lawrence Iser, a partner at law firm Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & 
Aldisert in Santa Monica, Calif., who represents musical artists and 
other entertainment industry clients.

Though its service isn't out yet, Attributor appears to go further than 
existing techniques for weeding out unauthorized uses of content online. 
While companies are tackling parts of the same problem -- Indigo Stream 
Technologies Ltd., based in Gibraltar, offers a free service called 
Copyscape that analyzes a Web page and then uses Google's search engine 
to see whether the text is duplicated elsewhere on the Web -- 
Attributor's approach is seemingly more comprehensive.

Its co-founders, former Yahoo Inc. executive Jim Brock, and Jim Pitkow, 
a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has sold companies to Google and 
VeriSign Inc., claim to have cracked the thorny computer-science problem 
of scouring the entire Web by using undisclosed technology to 
efficiently process and comb through chunks of content. The company says 
it will have over 10 billion Web pages in its index before the end of 
this month.

"If it works, it's a fantastic invention," Mr. Iser says.

It's unclear whether such a service will be welcomed by Internet 
companies that allow users to post content. YouTube, News Corp.'s 
MySpace and others already face copyright lawsuits. In some cases, 
they're building systems to identify pirated materials consumers upload 
to their sites, and say they're open to sharing revenue with content owners.

Attributor plans to announce today that it has received about $10 
million in funding to date from investors including Sigma Partners, 
Selby Venture Partners, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus 
Capital.

Attributor analyzes the content of clients, who could range from 
individuals to big media companies, using a technique known as "digital 
fingerprinting," which determines unique and identifying characteristics 
of content. It uses these digital fingerprints to search its index of 
the Web for the content. The company claims to be able to spot a 
customer's content based on the appearance of as little as a few 
sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video. It will provide 
customers with alerts and a dashboard of identified uses of their 
content on the Web and the context in which it is used.

The content owners can then try to negotiate revenue from whoever is 
using it or request that it be taken down. In some cases, they may 
decide the content is being used fairly or to acceptable promotional 
ends. Attributor plans to help automate the interaction between content 
owners and those using their content on the Web, though it declines to 
specify how.

Company executives believe its system will provide transparency and 
accountability to encourage more owners to put their content online with 
confidence they'll be able to police its use, and share in any profits.

"We believe that we can provide an infrastructure that will support all 
kinds of outcomes and remedies, which will align the interests of 
content owners, content hosts and search engines around legitimate 
syndication and monetization," says Mr. Brock, Attributor's chief executive.

"We see this as a way to take us out of the course we've been on, which 
is more litigation," says Mr. Pitkow, who is chief technology officer.

Attributor has begun testing the system, and won't release it officially 
until the first quarter of next year. The co-founders' track records, 
however, lend credibility to their claims. As Yahoo's first outside 
counsel, Mr. Brock tackled Internet copyright issues for the Internet 
company as far back as 1994 and later oversaw some of its core 
businesses as a senior vice president. Mr. Pitkow is a computer science 
Ph.D. who worked at Xerox's legendary PARC research facility. In 2001, 
he helped to sell the intellectual property of Outride Inc., where he 
was president and chairman, to Google. Last year, he sold Moreover 
Technologies, where he was CEO and chairman, to VeriSign.

"They're real guys who have solved hard-core problems," says Ali Aydar, 
chief operating officer of Snocap Inc., a digital-music registry 
start-up. Snocap and Attributor share a backer in Silicon Valley 
investor Ron Conway. "Content owners I've talked to outside of the music 
business would love a system which tells them where their content is 
being utilized," Mr. Aydar adds.

Attributor executives decline to say how frequently they will update 
their Web index, a key factor in their ability to stay on top of 
postings. They also say they won't at least initially monitor 
peer-to-peer file swapping systems, where large amounts of pirated 
music, movies, TV shows and software are traded.

Write to Kevin J. Delaney at kevin.delaney at wsj.com