Year of Original Content: FairShare Helps Track Content Theft

In honor of my declaring war on content theft with the “Year of Original Content,” FairShare is offering a limited number of free registrations for Blog Herald readers to try their copyright infringement tracking system currently in private beta testing.

Jonathan Bailey recently reviewed FairShare and said:

FairShare, unlike Attributor’s current business service, is targeted at bloggers and Webmasters who want to track how their content is being used and where, but do not require advanced tools and filtering. It works with Creative Commons licenses and tracks where content reappears, how much is used, if the content is linked and if the site displays any advertisements.

Though the service carries with it many different limitations, for bloggers that can not afford or don’t have the time to use a more advanced system, it is likely a very good choice.

FairShare creates a feed based upon your blog’s URL that is matched against the sites that FairShare monitors and tracks across the web, comparing the content against the original by checking the number of words copied, whether or not the matching site links back, if there are ads on the site, and other copyright violations in accordance with your selected Creative Commons license. FairShare supports all six v3.0 Creative Commons licenses.

The copied content is stored in an iframe, which gives you the ability to leave a comment advising the webmaster or blogger that the usage of your original content violates your copyright, a first step in the process for reporting a copyright violation. However, FairShare currently offers little else to help you fight back against copyright violations.

The inability to quickly and efficiently respond to copyright violations is annoying, but understandable. The more you make a copyright violation response generic and template based, the easier it is to ignore it. Most scraper sites are grabbing from dozens to thousands of sites, so a massive system like this sending out form letters would surely be ignored. The response you send out must also be customized to match the type of copyright violation, such as use of your content on a “commercial” site with ads, exceeding Fair Use, etc. And if FairShare provides such templates, they could also be legally bound to support them. Hopefully, they will consider adding some basic, but customizable template forms to help those who are novices at confronting content theft.

FairShare is the free version of Attributor, a commercial copyright violation verification service used by major publishers to track wide scale use and abuse of their content. Both services rely upon their own search engine and database for tracking content across approximately 35 billion pages on the web, rather than search engines. According to Jonathan’s experience with Attributor, the results fairly match what is possible through manual Google searches for content violations.

FairShare is also embracing localization and international monitoring, as it works with about 20 languages currently.

See Also

Old Blogging Sites That We Thought were Gone

FairShare is free and committed to remaining free, though paid services may be added later in the development to help bloggers and webmasters respond more efficiently to copyright violations.

I’ve been using FairShare and Attributor with the help of Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today for over six months during their early testing phase. While it has improved dramatically, it is now time for a greater number of users to give their input.

In honor of “Year of Original Content,” Blog Herald readers can sign up through the FairShare Beta site and use YearofOriginalContent as the invite code for a first hand look at how this copyright infringement tracking service works and add your feedback to the project.

There are only a few invites, and it’s first come first serve.