On his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, Alan Mutter says a company called Attributor has rounded up several big media companies and is set to go after sites that hock their content for free.

Mutter writes:

The first offending sites to be targeted will be those using 80% or more of copyrighted stories more than 10 times per month.

In the first stage of a multi-step process aimed at encouraging copyright compliance instead of punishing scofflaws, Pitkow said online publishers identified by his company will be sent a letter informing them of the violations and urging them to enter into license agreements with the publishers whose content appears on their sites.

If copyright pirates refuse to pay, Attributor will request the major search engines to remove offending pages from search results and will ask banner services to stop serving ads to pages containing unauthorized content. The search engines and ad services are required to immediately honor such requests by the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Do you think this technique has a shot at working, or is it just the desperate flailing of a dying industry?

First web copyright crackdown coming [Reflections of a Newsosaur]

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