As newspapers and other publishers watch their revenues diminish, one common refrain among them is that maybe they should somehow go after Google or Yahoo for aiding and abetting the destruction of their businesses and sometimes the wholesale theft of their content. We’ve seen how the Associated Press wants to handle this: by aggressively going after anyone who even borrows a headline. Today, a consortium of other publishers including Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico are taking a more measured approach, but one which will no doubt still be controversial. They are forming the Fair Syndication Consortium, which is the brainchild of Attributor, the startup which tracks the reuse of text and images across the Web for many of these same publishers.

The Fair Syndication Consortium is initially trying to address a legitimate problem on the Web: the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which do nothing more than republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. There are tens of thousands of these sites, perhaps more. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google’s AdSense, and Yahoo primarily. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher’s work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites.

I know a little bit about this because in January I was invited to a meeting at the A.P.’s headquarters with about two dozen other publishers, most of them from the print world, to discuss the formation of the consortium. TechCrunch has not joined at this time. Ironically, neither has the A.P., which has apparently decided to go its own way and fight the encroachments of the Web more aggressively (although, to my knowledge, it still uses Attributor’s technology). But at that meeting, which was organized by Attributor, a couple slides were shown that really brought home the point to everyone in the room. One showed a series of bar graphs estimating how much ad revenues splogs were making simply from the feeds of everyone in the room. (Note that this was just for sites taking extensive copies of articles, not simply quoting). The numbers ranged from $13 million (assuming a $.25 effective CPM) to $51 million (assuming a $1.00 eCPM).

Then they put up a slide with a pie chart showing which ad networks were serving ads on all of the abusive sites. It turns out a full 94 percent of the sites in question were serving ads from three ad networks: DoubleClick (45 percent), Google AdSense (24 percent), and Yahoo (24 percent).

Go after those three ad networks, and the majority of the problem could be solved. There is certainly precedent for this type of approach. Look at YouTube’s Content ID program, which splits revenues between YouTube and the media companies whose videos are being reused online. 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.

How would the ad networks know that the content in question belongs to the publisher? Attributor would keep track of it all and manage the requests for payment. The consortium is open to any publisher to join, including bloggers. (Attributor runs a free version of its service called FairShare to give publishers a sense of how much of their stuff is being copied without attribution). It is certainly better than sending out thousands of takedown notices, but many issues still need to be worked out.

I’ve seen some of the data for TechCrunch, and there is no doubt that Attributor catches a lot of abuse, not fair use. But some of the sites that fall within Attributors net might still fall within fair use. For instance, I can imagine, a short post two or three paragraphs long being copied in its entirety and being surrounded by commentary. (Although, a minimum 125-word-count limit and exclusion of content clearly in quotes is meant to address such a scenario). Also, I am not sure that demanding payment is the way to go. For the most part, a link and attribution is good enough for us. But if the Fair Syndication consortium gets the ad networks on board and they take a conservative approach to asserting copyright, we might take another look. What do you think, should we join?

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With its news syndication business under direct attack by the growing abundance of other news sources on the Internet, the Associated Press announced today that it will begin to police the Web and “develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used.” The A.P., it appears, wants to become the RIAA of the flailing newspaper industry—ferreting out information pirates and threatening lawsuits if they don’t turn over some of their Google gold.

The A.P. has a broad view of what constitutes its content. It is not just entire articles copied wholesale by spam blogs. The A.P. has problems with the unauthorized use of its headlines, even when they include links. Many of its policies ignore the concept of fair use. And even when it has cause to go after copyright violators, it sometimes relies on antiquated and tortuous legal theories. The A.P. is so backwards in its thinking that we’ve banned links to all of its stories on TechCrunch.

Now it wants to go after unauthorized use if its news articles across the Web. Forget for a moment that its notion of what constitutes unauthorized use may not hold up in a court of law. The A.P. is going directly after the search engines and news aggregators which often point traffic away from A.P. sources directly at the supposed infringers.

So how exactly does the A.P. plan on policing the Internet? Here I must rely on informed speculation, but I think I have a pretty good idea. The A.P. already monitors the Web for any partial or whole re-use of its articles and photos through a partnership with Attributor, a startup that has indexed the Web and can find any content for which it has a digital fingerprint. After identifying the worst offenders through Attributor, the A.P. could simply present that list to Google or any other site pointing to those offending sites and demand action. This action could be anything from redirecting links to A.P.-sanctioned sites to demanding a portion of the offending sites’ AdSense or other advertising revenues if they happen to be a customer.

Would Google comply with such requests? If doing so gets the A.P. and Rupert Murdoch off its back, and it believes there is a good chance that copyright infringement is taking place, it very well might. The real troubling aspect here is that this determination would not be made by a court, but rather placed into the hands of Google and the A.P. The A.P, for one, has already proven that it cannot be trusted to distinguish between fair use and infringement on its own behalf. And Google’s policy when it comes to claims of copyright infringement is to take down the offending content and ask questions later.

Update: Google explains its relationship with the A.P. and why it doesn’t think it should be a target in a new blog post.

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Attributor captured the candidates’ official speeches and position statements from the campaign sites, www.johnmccain.com and www.barackobama.com, and then scoured more than 25 billion pages on the Web to see where those words reappeared. In general, Obama’s message continues to resonate more overall, but just barely. Attributor estimates that Obama’s message was picked up on Websites that drew 38 million pageviews over the past two weeks, compared to 36 million pageviews for Websites that picked up McCain’s message. This represents a 10 percent surge by McCain.

In general blogs still favor Obama by about two to one, but the opposite is true for traditional news sites. McCain’s speeches and position statements appear on traditional news sites 80 percent more often than Obama’s. And on the sites of the major TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox), McCain has a 3 to 1 advantage. (This ratio should come down with the Democratic convention this week).

What is behind McCain’s surge? One factor is negative attacks on Obama, such as the Paris Hilton ad or John Corsi’s propaganda book. Over the past two weeks there have been twice as many attacks on Obama’s positions than on McCain’s, and those attacks were seen 2.8 million times so far in August versus 1.1 million views for attacks on McCain. (Attributor’s technology can identify negative or positive words). And it is not just the traditional news media that is eating up the attacks. Bloggers love them too. As the attacks have increased, so have blog matches citing McCain’s positions. In the past week, 350 new bloggers wrote about McCain’s views, marking the first time that McCain gained more new blog coverage than Obama (who picked up about 250 new bloggers). Going negative works.

A deeper dive into the data confirms another obvious conclusion: Obama has better speech writers than McCain. Two thirds of the Obama citations across the Web come from his speeches as opposed to his issue papers and position statements. For McCain, 55 percent of his messaging being picked up elsewhere comes from his position statements.

The single topic for each candidate that resonated the most across the Web over the past two weeks was the economy, which for Obama overtook Iraq as a hot-button issue for the first time. The most popular speeches for each candidate was McCain’s Energy Security speech, and Obama’s Berlin speech (which has gone viral and has been viewed more than an estimated two million times).

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GumGum launches an ambitious new project today – a new platform and business model for licensing content on the Internet, beginning with images.

Image piracy runs rampant on the Internet, of course. Blogger Perez Hilton was sued for stealing images of celebrities, and we’ve had (ridiculous) charges leveled at us as well. And don’t forget the recent Lane Hartwell debacle.

Attributor, a Silicon Valley startup, helps content owners track their intellectual property to find examples of infringement. But until now, no one has really thought about a better way to license content on the Internet, so that both large and tiny publishers have an incentive to avoid simply stealing stuff.

That’s where GumGum comes in. Images today are generally licensed for a flat fee, exclusively or non-exclusively. GumGum founders Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir think a better way is to charge for impressions, or on an advertising-supported basis. But tracking image impressions isn’t trivial, so they first had to build a platform to do that.

GumGum allows any publisher to search for images (there are thousands available now via a number of photography agencies) – here’s an example search for “Britney.” Images can be licensed on a CPM basis (generally $0.20 or so, but determined by content owner), or for free with an advertisement.

GumGum requires images be published via a Flash object so that impressions can be tracked and billed properly. Flash also allows them to serve interactive advertisements, served via VideoEgg (we wrote about their Flash ad product here).

Here are two images, one based on CPM licensing, one based on advertising:

Any photographer can now upload images and sell them. And any publisher can create an account to license images. Down the road, GumGum says, they’ll be adding video, audio and text content for licensing as well.

Will This Work?

It’s certainly a pain for publishers to have to embed a Flash object to publish an image, but it is the only reasonable way that GumGum can track impressions and serve ads. Many small publishers will of course simply continue to steal images, or look for freely usable stuff on Flickr. But if there is a killer image that a lot of people will want to publish, GumGum is a great way to easily license it to an unlimited number of people. At the very least, it’s an interesting experiment.

GumGum raised $125k in a December seed round from friends and family. The founders, who sold a previous startup Mojungle to Shozu in 2007, also put $125k of their own capital into GumGum.

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CondéNet is the latest media company to sign on as customer of Attributor (a startup I profiled earlier here) to see who across the Web is taking large chunks of text from CondéNet properties such as Epicurious.com, Style.com, Men.Style.com, and Concierge.com, without attribution or even so much as a link. Attributor is a reporting and tracking service that indexes a site’s content and finds copies of it on the Web.

CondéNet president Sarah Chubb signed on, she says, to get a better handle on how CondéNet content is being repurposed on the Web, In most cases, all she wants is a link back to the original site and she is even considering using the tool to find new syndication and advertising opportunities. In an e-mail, she explains her motives:

– We would like to see what our unknown distribution is.

– We’re not intending any sort of legal action unless someone is using our content in a way that could be damaging to us

– We do intend to contact the sites that are using our content to ask them to do one of a few things. On the most basic level we want attribution and a link. There might be other opportunities, with larger-traffic sites, to do some sort of ad deal with a rev share. If we find very high quality sites with a particular affinity and audience that lines up with our own verticals we might discuss a closer ad deal, as we have with the blog Sartorialist and men.style.com.

So it is fairly open ended but starts with us understanding what is out there.

That is certainly a much more enlightened view than we’ve seen so far from most big media companies, who confine access to their digital fingerprinting technology to their lawyers. Give these tools to business folks instead, and they will find new ways to make money in the future instead of trying to protect revenues from the past. CondeNet has much more to gain from generating tens of thousands of inbound links to its sites than sending out tens of thousands of cease-and-desist letters from its team of expensive lawyers. As I’ve said before, the link is the currency of the Web, and media companies who understand that will do better than those who don’t.

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For example, here is a screen shot from one random splog that just reposts TechCrunch’s entire feed with no links back to TechCrunch or even acknowledgement of the source:

Just for the record, taking any blog’s entire feed and republishing it as your own content is not okay. Notice that the only difference between this splog and TechCrunch is all the Google ads splattered everywhere.

We are not alone in this. Any blog that produces fresh content on a daily basis is an easy target. Google makes it economical to create such splogs through AdSense and then rewards them with traffic through its search engine. Google (and the other search engines) need to stop rewarding such behavior.

We knew the splog problem was bad, but we didn’t know how bad until earlier this week, when I did a post about Attributor (a new startup that can track who is copying your stuff all across the Web). I noted that Attributor found one TechCrunch post that had been copied in one way or another 572 times (not all of them bad).

Attributor catches all matches of blocks of text, so I asked them to break that number down. First, they threw out anything that was less than a five percent match, which left us with 467 matches. Of those 315, or two thirds, linked back to the original post. So that is the good news. It appears that most bloggers are good citizens. But 152 of them, or fully one third, did not link back. And of those, 115—or 25 percent of the original—were plastered with ads, making money off our work without so much as a link.

Here is a screen shot of the original post, which covered the beta launch of Hulu:

Now here is a screen shot of one of the splogs (notice the similarity?):

And another one (complete with a Jessica Alba cheese ad—although it arguably does give the headline an unintentionally different nuance):

You get the idea. Admittedly, this is completely anecdotal. It is only one post. But it does point to a larger problem. Other bloggers out there, have you been splogged today? Probably.

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Attributor was founded in 2005 and has raised $10 million from Sigma Partners, Selby Ventures, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus. The enterprise version of its service launches today, although it has been testing it with Reuters and AP for about six months. The enterprise service will cost anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year (a more limited self-serve version for bloggers and smaller publishers could cost as little as $6 or $7 per month, and will launch in 2008). CEO Jim Brock gave me a demo of Attributor last week in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria.

Attributor is already indexing 100 million Web pages a day (15 billion total so far), but it is not a keyword index. It looks for bigger blocks of content. Right now, it can handle only text. Images are in beta. And video matching will go into beta early next year. If you are a publisher that is a customer of Attributor, it ingests all your content and comes up with matches. Attributor splits up the world between sites that exhibit extensive copying (more than half of an article, for instance) and just some copying. It shows which sites have linked back to the original source and which have not. “Often, that’s all they want—a link,” says Brock. Below is a typical dashboard view of what a customer would see. In this case, the content from People.com is being analyzed (based on its feed). Of the 265,000 matches, 103,000 don’t link back to People.com.

Attributor also shows which sites generate the most traffic, which are supported by ads, and which ad networks are making the most money off of your content across the Web. Of the sites that copy People.com extensively, for instance, 55,000 are supported by ads. “This becomes a billing engine at some level,”says Brock. But rather than go after each offending site, he thinks that Attributor’s data will give media companies leverage against Google and other ad networks. “If I am a big content producer,” reasons Brock, “and I can identify all the pages with Google AdSense, my conversations at that point is with Google.” They could ask Google to ban the offending sites from AdSense or, better yet, to cut them in on some of the advertising revenues associated with their content.

Ultimately, though, it is all about the links. Links are the currency of the Web. They are the way attributions are made. In most cases, media companies would be better off if they could just get everyone who is copying their stuff to link back to them than by trying to extract licensing fees out of them or suing them. There is a lot less friction in asking for a link, and it doesn’t cost anything to give one out. Yet all of those links can turn into traffic, both directly and by imbuing the original source with higher search karma (i.e. a higher ranking on search engines).

A case in point is what is going on with music lyrcis on the Web. The term “song lyrics” is one of the most popular searches online. In a study just released today (PDF here), Attributor scoured the Web for the lyrics of 14 of the songs at the top of the Billboard charts. It found 1,524 copies, mostly on lyrics sites, social networks, and blogs. The only site that has actually bothered to cut licensing deals with the record labels for these lyrics is Yahoo Music, yet in all Google searches (and even 81 percent of Yahoo searches) other sites outrank Yahoo Music when it comes to finding the lyrics for these 14 songs. Of those sites, 57 percent were supported by ads (mostly AdSense) for ring tones, concert tickets, and the like. A Google search for the lyrics to the Rihanna song Umbrella (pictured above) shows how much AdSense is powering the lyrics Websites.

It’s not just lyrics. In another study evaluating 215 recipes on Epicurious, Attributor found 3.959 copies, 65 percent of which did not link back to Epicurious, and 56 percent of which were ad-supported sites. More than half of the copycat sites ranked higher in searches than Epicurious itself. I asked Attributor to run a search on some of my TechCrunch posts. One reporting some early details of Google’s OpenSocial project (codenamed Maka-Maka) was the 15th most copied post on TechCrunch since June, when Attributor started monitoring our feeds. (This Hulu post was the most copied overall, being copied 572 times).

For the Maka-Maka post, Attributor found 243 copies, with 200 of those taking more than 80 percent of the text. Fewer than 40 percent actually linked back to the original post (you swine!) and 79 percent had ads on the pages. And this is just for one post. I won’t actually link to the offending sites—you know who you are so cough up those links—but here are some screen shots (highlighted portions are copied verbatim from TechCrunch—at least one takes our entire feed, reposts it with AdSense ads, strip out names of the authors, and does not link back to TechCrunch):

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