Copyright concerns take a voyage of Discovery

A new service from iCopyright allows publishers and content creators to find out who's reusing some or all of their words and pictures. But don't just think of it as a tool to beat up on "little guys" online, says the owner of the company.

In fact, CEO Mike O'Donnell says that searching out plagiarists and other abusers of copyright is "a distant third" on the list of things his firm's new Discovery service can do.

The service, which is available as a free trial to companies that do business with iCopyright (e.g., Reuters, the Associated Press, and other large media firms), is most helpful for finding new potential partners, advertisers, or subscribers, on the theory that if another site like what you're cooking they may want to become a regular at the restaurant. A secondary use, license verification, makes sure that current business partners or licensees are taking their fair share of content and using it as promised.

Any savvy person in the technology field may wonder how a small company keeps track of the tens of thousands of articles and photos the mainstream media can produce each day. Clients place a tag in articles that allows iCopyright to grab a "fingerprint" -- a snapshot of each article -- in real time. Once the article's online, iCopyright crawls the net as an API on the back on a major search-engine spider -- O'Donnell won't say whose -- and gathers another snapshot of each reuse instance it finds.

Back at the ranch, the service compares the freshly gathered snapshots to a series of filters set by each publisher and rates each find, similar to the way spam filters rate questionable pieces of mail to determine whether they're over a junk-mail probability threshold. Filters might include a certain percentage of an article's words used, presence of a credit or byline, presence of third-party ads on the page, and so forth.

If a found page is beyond the pale according to the publisher (for instance, someone "borrowed" all the words in an article, removed the copyright notice, and slapped some AdSense ads around it -- a classic spam-blog builders' maneuver), the page is flagged and the publisher is alerted.

And that, O'Donnell told BetaNews, is where people get confused. He notes that he's gotten nasty-grams from some net users who believe that any copyright reinforcement -- or even any inquiry as to who's doing what with your words -- is bad. But Discovery, he told BetaNews, is "trying to give publishers some tools to find out this stuff, but it's important not to beat on the tool. The tech is agnostic."