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… → Read More
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… → Read More
Who is doing a better job of getting his message across on the Web: John McCain or Barack Obama? Conventional wisdom says that it is Obama, whose performance on the Web has been strong since the beginning. And conventional wisdom is still correct when it comes to blogs and social networks. But a new study by Attributor that is being released today shows that McCain is actually leading on… → Read More
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. → Read More
Digital media fingerprinting technologies are quickly becoming part of every media company’s arsenal when it comes to combating copyright infringement on the Web. So far, most media companies have used the technology primarily as an enforcement tool, in conjunction with their subpeona machines. But CondéNet, the online arm of Condé Nast magazines, is looking for ways to use digital… → Read More
Here at TechCrunch, there is nothing we love more than when one of our posts gets linked to and talked about. And like the majority of other blogs out there, we try to be good citizens by linking back to any source from which we excerpt. But there is a growing minority of spam blogs, or splogs, that indiscriminately take entire posts from other blogs and present them as their own. For example… → Read More
Every media company on the planet knows that its articles, songs, photos, and videos are being copied and spread willy-nilly across the Web, but they don’t have a clue what to do about it. They are not even sure what to do about all of their stuff that is just on YouTube (should they let Google monitor itself or create some vague industry guidelines and hope that every site follows them?). A… → Read More
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