The new technology, which was developed by the year-old Silicon Valley startup, could prove to be a tonic for media companies desperate to stop — or at the very least curb — online infringement of their copyrights, a problem they see as without end given the ready accessibility of content through sites such as Google and YouTube.
So far, media companies have managed the problem with a mix of tools, including digital rights management technology, in-house Internet searches for infringement and armies of lawyers churning out cease-and-desist letters.
“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,” attorney Lawrence Iser told the Wall Street Journal.
Attributor, which developed its product in “stealth mode” over the past year, announced the news publicly today in anticipation of a release early next year. The company also has announced that it has received $10 million dollars in capital to bring its product to the market.
Attributor was founded by Jim Brock, a former Yahoo executive, and Jim Pitkow, a former research scientist at Xerox and PARC.
“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,” Brock said.
Pitkow, who holds more than 24 patents pertaining to information retrieval, claims to have solved the problem of scanning billions of web pages in one fell swoop using undisclosed technology.
Pitkow said he hopes media companies will purchase the Attributor service and use it as a tool to protect their content without having to resort to litigation.
“If it works, it’s fantastic,” Iser said.
While there is little information about how Attributor actually works, Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Delaney said its approach is “seemingly more comprehensive” than other companies angling to do the same thing.
“They're real guys who have solved hardcore problems,” said, Ali Aydar CEO of digital music registry firm Snocap. “Content owners I've talked to outside of the music business would love a system, which tells them where their content is being utilized.”
For now, officials at Attributor said they would not monitor peer-to-peer file swapping systems, where a great deal of illegal content is traded. The company also declined to say how often it would update its index, which is a key part of staying on top of postings.