While YouTube, MySpace and others work on site-related solutions to the posting of unauthorized material, a company profiled in Monday’s WSJ is trying for a web-wide answer. Attributor Corp. co-founders Jim Pitkow, former chairman and CEO of Moreover, and Jim Brock, the lawyer who was first outside counsel and then Yahoo SVP for several years, claim their system can find unauthorized video, text, audio and images across the web. They told Kevin Delaney the Attributor index will have more than 10 billion web pages by the end of 2006. Founded last year, the Redwood City, Calif. start-up emerges from stealth mode with the announcement that it has raised about $10 million from a variety of investors including Sigma Partners, Selby Venture Partners, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus Capital.
How does it work? Clients provide Attributor with content for analysis and digital fingerprinting. Using the results, the system, now being tested, searches the web for matches and provides clients with a list of identified users. It’s up to the copyright holders to follow up although Attributor is working on an automated option. No immediate plans to monitor P2P swapping. The official release is slated for 1Q07 so we may have to wait to see if the emperor really is wearing new clothes.