• February 5, 2008

CondeNet, the online arm of Conde Nast, became the latest Web publisher to sign on with Attributor, a service that monitors unauthorized copying online by scanning billions of Web pages for plagiarized material.

Attributor's technology digitally "fingerprints" content including articles, images and videos for tracking across the Web. CondeNet said it would use Attributor mainly to help improve search engine results for original content and to gain traffic and ad revenue from sites that aren't linking back to CondeNet sites when using content.

"We would like to see what our unknown distribution is," said Sarah Chubb, president of CondeNet. "We're not intending any sort of legal action unless someone is using our content in a way that could be damaging to us." With larger sites, she added, the monitoring could lead to some types of ad revenue-sharing deals. Epicurious.com, Style.com, Men.Style.com, and Concierge.com. are among properties CondeNet will track with Attributor. Among publishers already using the service are The Associated Press, Reuters and NewsCanada.

--Mark Walsh