Intellectual Property

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.