A busy day today for Copyright Alliance member Attributor. For one, it dispensed with the "beta" tag that's been up and running for months for AP and one month for Reuters and made official its content monitoring and analysis platform to track copied content across the Internet. (What's up with these Silicon Valley folks being so attached to the "beta" label, anyway?) This very cool technology was discussed at our July 24 panel discussion in the U.S. Capitol with Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) (read the transcript). It allows for enforcement of copyrights but also for new licensing opportunities as well; in other words, the copyright owner (say, a wire service) is able to use its rights as it wishes. See the New York Times and TechCrunch.

Attributor also today (unless I missed an earlier release) made public a survey it performed on song lyrics being pursued in search engines. Please read Attributor's blog entry on the study, which directs you to the study itself, but in a nutshell it appears that Yahoo! is licensing song lyrics and putting them on a sanctioned site, but the text is being taken by other, unlicensed lyrics sites that often appear high in searches, and a majority of the time contain Internet ads producing revenue not going to Yahoo! or the songwriters or music publishers. No real surprise there, but it helps to have data supporting what one might have hypothesized.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 12:42 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under advertising, creators, drm, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.