Attributor partners Creative Commons for online copyright tracking

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Online copyright tracking service Attributor has teamed up with Creative Commons (CC) as part of a new initiative aimed at individual journalists and bloggers. The FairShare site will allow users to submit an RSS feed of their work and track how this content spreads and is reused online.

They will then be given the option to select a CC licence as part of the service to decide whether their work can be shared freely, with links or for non-commercial use only.

At time of writing, the private trial of the scheme found that for 71,758 submitted blogs and articles these had been shared a total of 709,997 times. It is now in public beta, a release from Attributor has confirmed.

Bloggers and individuals looking who want to make money from their content are the primary targets of the service, Rich Pearson, vice president of marketing for Attributor, told Journalism.co.uk.

"Regardless of what size you are you should be able to see where your content ends up. This is the beginning of claiming your content in text as well as adding commercial aspects to it. This is where the web is going."

Individuals will be able to decide, using CC, whether reuse is a problem or an opportunity for them and act accordingly, he added.

Attributor's paid-for copyright tracking service is currently used by the

Financial Times and the Press Association and allows clients to filter searches for copied content, for example by the amount reused, which is not available on FairShare.

Expanding the service to cover images is being considered, however, Pearson added.