AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Venture Beat

Attributor is showing online publishers how to use plagiarism of their content by other sites to their advantage.

It offers a service that a publisher track how its articles, images and videos are being used on other sites, without its permission. Then, it offers ways for these publishers to contact the offending parties and request links back to their content (which, in turn, causes their pages to appear higher in search results, leading to more traffic). Or, it helps them contact the perpetrator and ask for a share of the ad revenue gained from the plagiarized content. Or, send a take-down request.

The Redwood City, Calif. company has been in a roll. It was in private beta with two of the largest publishers in the world, Reuters and the Associated Press, until the end of last year. It has since come out of private beta, and signed up some more big-name clients, including Conde Nast, The Canadian Press, Associated Content, and others. …more…