More than 400,000 unlicensed copies of articles from major US news websites were republished online between March and July this year, according to new research published this week by copyright tracking service Attributor.
Attributor's Graduated Response Trial for News monitored 70,101 news articles during the period and discovered that in more than 400,000 cases 80 per cent of the original article had been illegally copied. In all, 44,906 websites were involved in republishing content, the company announced this in a statement.
The mechanism randomly chose 107 sites from the trial results that had used 10 or more full copies from one copyright holder's website within 30 days and were making money from advertising on their sites. It was found that 75 per cent of these sites responded to either a courtesy notice sent to the site owner or removal requests sent to advertisers or search engines.
Attributor used the research to test out remedies for the copyright holders before resorting to takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA).
Jim Pitkow, CEO of Attributor, said, “The results of this trial demonstrate for the first time that website owners are cooperative and readily comply with content owner requests, paving the way for new monetization models, such as sharing of ad revenues generated by syndicated content, to flourish. The Trial suggests the Graduated Response framework is effective in solving the growing problem of newspaper copying, and shows its potential to reshape copyright polices across the publishing industry at large.”
The Attributor technology is used by the Fair Syndication Consortium, launched in 2009, and backed by news organisations like Reuters and Politico.
