Attributor is the leading provider of digital content protection solutions for the publishing industry. Attributor offers products that enable publishers to identify and verify copy infringement, enforce authorized use, analyze market demand and monetize digital content.

Attributor’s system crawls tens to hundreds of millions of pages on the Internet daily and verifies whether it is authorized reuse. When Attributor finds a use that is not permitted, the hosting site is alerted and receives a range of options depending on the publisher and author, including a request to swap for authorized content, a licensing request, or a DMCA takedown notice.

Attributor can digitally fingerprint each piece of content to uniquely identify the content based on its essential features. Each content owner can define permitted use of their original content, such as how much can be copied, what kind of attribution is required and whether and on what terms commercial use is permitted.

Attributor’s products and services are highly scalable and are used by all types of publishers- from the largest in the world to individual authors across book publishing, news and magazine publishers and financial institutions.Operating 24x7 across geographies, Attributor’s solutions address all of the components of the digital content ecosystem including supply, distribution and demand.

Research and Activity:

In April 2009, Attributor and more than 1,000 publishing companies founded the Fair Syndication Consortium, the goal of which is to establish a new online content syndication model.

In December 2009, Attributor and the Fair Syndication Consortium released research data on the proliferation of U.S. newspaper content, which found that over a 30-day period more than 75,000 unlicensed sites reused U.S. newspaper content online. According to the study, on these sites, 112,000 near-exact copies of unlicensed articles were detected.

Attributor’s FairShare Guardian service monitored 913 books in 14 subjects in the final quarter of 2009 and estimated that more than 9 million copies of books were illegally downloaded from the 25 sites it tracked.

In April 2010, Attributor reported on online magazine infringement. The researched looked at a segment of the magazine industry: 133 English language magazine titles, and the infringement that occurs on just 20 of the more than 2,000 domains that illegally host full-issue downloads of these magazines. Among the results, Attributor found 3,996 instances of downloadable, full issues of these 133 magazines on these 20 sites, and 84 of the 133 (63%) magazines had infringements.

Following the magazine report, Attributor produced an Ad Server Report that analyzed those that monetize content across 270 million domains, which is nearly 75% more domains and pages covered than in previous studies. Most notably, Google and DoubleClick overwhelmingly dominated the market, combining for more than 65% of the market share, which, compared to the December 2008 report, is an increase of about 9%.

In October 2010, Attributor released a research report on online book piracy, indicating that publishers could be losing out on as much as $3 billion to online book piracy. This was followed by the release of their Graduated Response Trial which showed the majority of sites were willing to license content or remove it.