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Consortium Aims To Recoup Revenue From Stolen Content

The Associated Press wants to handle the problem of third party aggregators borrowing or even stealing its content "by aggressively going after anyone who even borrows a headline," notes TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld. Publishers are unquestionably angry and perplexed by this issue, but a group called The Fair Syndication Consortium is taking "a more measured approach," he says. Founded by Attributor, a startup that tracks the reuse of text and images across the Web, the group seeks to address the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites that republish content from news sites and blogs, often failing to provide links or attribution. "There are tens of thousands of these sites, perhaps more," Schonfeld says.

Instead of going after these sites, the Fair Syndication Consortium, whose partners include Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America and Politico, plans to negotiate directly with the ad networks that serve their ads. A whopping 94% of the ads served on these sites come from DoubleClick, Google AdSense and Yahoo. The consortium plans to charge these networks for a portion of the ad revenue generated by sites that steal content.

As Schonfeld says, "go after these three ad networks, and the majority of the problem could be solved." He adds that YouTube's Content ID program provides a precedent for this approach, "except this proposal would take money that would otherwise be distributed to the splog sites themselves, and give a portion of it to the publisher as an automatic syndication fee without the consent of the site owner." Interestingly, Schonfeld reveals that TechCrunch was asked to join the consortium, but declined. He notes that the AP also declined, deciding to confront the issue on its own instead, while still using Attributor's technology.

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