Attributor
Encyclopedia
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.
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.
The company states that its FairShare crawlers honor the robots exclusion standard
and identify the user agent
string clearly.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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 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, 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. Attributor typically comes out with new research on a quarterly basis.
Features
Its three main products are "Guardian", to detect infringement, "Insight", to track demand, and "Fairnotice", to notify infringers and obtain payment. 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.Criticisms
One critic asserts that Attributor's web crawlerWeb crawler
A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.This process is called Web...
ignores the robots exclusion standard
Robots Exclusion Standard
The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web crawlers and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to...
and spoofs its user agent
User agent
In computing, a user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client–server distributed computing system...
string. This is common, and arguably necessary, for Internet monitors, but webmasters may choose to block it more aggressively.
The company states that its FairShare crawlers honor the robots exclusion standard
Robots Exclusion Standard
The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web crawlers and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to...
and identify the user agent
User agent
In computing, a user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client–server distributed computing system...
string clearly.
History
Attributor was founded in 2005 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. In April 2008, it then received Series C funding totaling $12 Million, led by JAFCO Ventures with participation from Turner Broadcasting and previous investors.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.
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.
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.
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. 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 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, 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. Attributor typically comes out with new research on a quarterly basis.
See also
- Plagiarism detectionPlagiarism detectionPlagiarism detection is the process of locating instances of plagiarism within a work or document. The widespread use of computers and the advent of the Internet has made it easier to plagiarize the work of others. Most cases of plagiarism are found in academia, where documents are typically essays...
- Search engine optimizationSearch engine optimizationSearch engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...
- Content marketingContent marketingContent marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to...
- Article marketingArticle marketingArticle marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry. These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article has a bio box and byline that include references and contact information for...
- Intellectual propertyIntellectual propertyIntellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
- Copyright InfringementCopyright infringementCopyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.- "Piracy" :...
- Digital Millennium Copyright ActDigital Millennium Copyright ActThe Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization . It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to...
- Web SyndicationWeb syndicationWeb syndication is a form of syndication in which website material is made available to multiple other sites. Most commonly, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary or update of the website's recently added content...