Attributor’s Innovative Tool Monitors Copyright Compliance Online

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.

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