Web rights

A buddy of mine, Jim Pitkow and his latest company Attributor was featured in a Wall Street Journal article today talking about the technology these folk have created to scan the web for content as a means for tracking digital rights use/abuse on the web.

This could be huge, with the explosion of images, audio, and video not to mention the massive amounts of other intellectual property published on the web -- being able to track this could be an important piece to the puzzle on how to keep the web semi-organized and 'safe' for all publishers of content.

Having spent some time with DRM systems, I've always been suspect of how such systems can scale and survive on the Net. Some of them have been closed systems that require all things to be under one tent. All of them have suffered from the ability of smart people to 'break' their system, thus rendering them ineffective and setting up an arms race between the DRM and the hacker community.

On the other hand, tracking content on the web has been a challenge due to the massive scale that must be dealt with. A different kind of search engine, in this case dealing with finding and tracking specific pieces of information through, one can imagine, some form of fingerprinting technology that they've developed. A very interesting problem, I hope they've found a way to crack it.

Very cool stuff, and good luck to the Attributor team!

Kipp