The Fight to Protect Online Content

As technologies that enable the free use of digital content improve, technologies to try to track and monitor that free use do as well:

The Associated Press is moving to protect its content by partnering with the technology company Attributor, which will track AP material across the Internet. The arrangement will allow Attributor to "fingerprint" AP copy down to a level where it can be identified anywhere on the Web.

……Attributor can keep tabs on text but extracting what Attributor CEO and co-founder Jim Brock calls the "DNA" of the material, which boils down to a specific paragraph or a few sentences. With that information, Attributor can watch where the content is going in turn giving publishers a map. Publishers can then determine where, how, and when the content is used.

From Editor and Publisher. Link via Comics Reporter.