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Attributor's Anti-Piracy "Guardian" Trial Begins Feb 24, 2010 Attributor's "Fair Share Consortium" got a fair amount of pub ( Attributor's "Fair Share Consortium Completes Newspaper Trifecta ") last year with a blindingly simple idea: monetize illegal use of copyrighted news content. That's otherwise known as anti-piracy as business development, one of favorite web jujitsu strategies. Rather than huff and puff about taking down unauthorized usage, threatening uncertain court action, just make money on it. The notion: go to the ad servers providing the ads against the unauthorized content, and get them to share a piece of any ad money with original publishers, taking it from the distributor's share. That was last year, and little progress has been made on that point. Two reasons, at least. First and foremost, Google and Yahoo - the two major ad servers here - haven't embraced the notion. Sure, they say, we want to help out those beleaguered publishers, but, hey, it's complicated, so let's take another meeting, and another, and another. Secondly, for publishers, "anti-piracy" isn't the first thing on their to-do lists; avoiding (or emerging from) bankruptcy is. Further, they've cut back staff, so even if they signed on with Attributor as many did, their use of the Attributor system has been haphazard. So the Redwood City-based start-up is trying a different approach. They've dubbed their new service " FairShare Guardian ." In the next 90 days, they'll be in their trial phase of it. What's the same: Attributor will still monitor editorial content use, comparing publishers' content to its usage on the web, determining and reporting what's licensed and what's not. Now, though, publishers can "outsource" (for a monthly subscription fee, based on how much content Attributor is monitoring) to Attributor the follow-through. If Attributor finds illegal