Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching

As content recognition software gets more sophisticated, expect more copyright-related battles online like the recent AP-blogger flap

by Peter Burrows

The Associated Press unleashed a firestorm in the blogosphere earlier this month when it demanded that a political site take down AP content it said violated copyrights. Bloggers, including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com and Markos Moulitas of Daily Kos, cried foul, saying the AP's move threatened the free flow of information over the Web. The furor abated a few days later when the AP tempered its demands.

But the dustup between the AP and bloggers was just an early skirmish in what's likely to become a protracted war over how and where media content is published online. On one side are bloggers and other Web sites eager to ensure continued access to information. On the other are media companies intent on controlling or cashing in on the dissemination of their stories, videos, and other digital media. One reason: For the first time, content owners are able to track exactly where and how their words and images show up, thanks to an emerging class of technology called content recognition systems.

Manual Tracking No Longer Necessary

The AP, a not-for-profit news cooperative owned by thousands of subscriber newspapers, has been using a system from Redwood City (Calif.)-based startup Attributor. Like other content recognition systems, Attributor's software extracts a small digital fingerprint—a string of bits unique to a given article, song, or video—and collects them in a database. Then it continually crawls billions of Web sites and blogs, much as Google does when a user launches a search, to detect where that fingerprint recurs. In the recent incident, AP had unearthed instances where its content—at times whole articles—was posted to the liberal-leaning Web site Drudge Retort. Other Attributor customers include Thomson Reuters (TRI), Condé Nast Publications' CondéNet, and the Canadian Press. The AP and Attributor declined to comment on the incident.

For a media executive, the appeal of a content recognition system is clear. With a glance, a publisher or studio head can plainly see where, when, and how their content is being viewed. In a demonstration for BusinessWeek earlier this year, Attributor executives showed how many times scenes from The Sopranos had appeared on 20 leading video sites since they first aired on TV. In all, 1,500 scenes from 52 episodes had been viewed 32 million times. For Time Warner's (TWX) HBO, those viewings might have brought in more than $1 million, said Attributor Chief Executive Officer Jim Brock.

Availability of technology like Attributor's represents a sea change for companies that until recently had to track online content manually or hire an outside company to do it. The new systems can automate the job and do it more cheaply. Most big TV and movie studios, including NBC Universal and Walt Disney (DIS), use systems from companies such as Audible Magic and Vobile to monitor the massive traffic at online video sites such as Google's (GOOG) YouTube. Even phone giant AT&T (T) plans to use Vobile technology (BusinessWeek.com, 11/7/07) to help it root out piracy over the Web.