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
Unauthorized Paid Apps Are Appropriating Top News Brands
The New York Times, BBC, CNET Among the Victims
by
Nat Ives
Published:
January
14, 2010
A correction has been made in this
story.
See below
for details.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Memo to news publishers: Build a paid app or someone
else will do it for you -- without giving you a cut.
The BBC Mobile News Reader: Unauthorized.
As Time Inc. veteran
editor Josh Quittner recently
pointed out
on his Netly blog, iPhone owners can finally fork
over 99 cents to buy New York Times apps. Only neither of the two paid Times
apps --
The New York Times Mobile Reader
and
New York Times Mobile News Reader
-- have anything to do with
The Times, which only offers free apps like
this one
so far. Both, however, are on the App Store's list of
most-popular paid news apps.
"They are not authorized," a Times spokeswoman said, "and our legal
department is looking into the matter."
And The Times isn't the only victim in the news business.
CNET discovered 99 cent
CNET apps
in the last month, according to a spokeswoman for
CBS Interactive, which owns CNET. But CNET has not actually introduced any apps
of its own. "We've contacted the creators and told them the apps need to be
removed," the spokeswoman said.
The Guardian said this week that its legitimate
$3.99 app
has sold nearly 70,000 times since its introduction
on December 14. But the
BBC Mobile News Reader
, currently No. 3 among most-popular
paid news apps, has nothing to do with the BBC -- another news provider that
actually doesn't offer any apps.
One of the developers behind some of these apps also sells a
Fox News
app
and a
CNN
app
.
Attempts to reach the developers themselves, by e-mail and by contact forms
on their websites, were unsuccessful.
