Safe Creative Partners with Attributor

Copyright verification and non-repudiation service Safe Creative announced a new partnership with content tracking company Attributor to offer content tracking for text works registered with the service.

The new feature, which is free to all users of Safe Creative, feeds text works registered through the service through Attributor’s FairShare service and reports back on any matches that FairShare finds. Safe Creative Users can then create an Incidence for the case and begin working on enforcement.

Currently, the service is limited to two matches per work, which may not be adequate for many users, but the service is in beta and that amount could very easily change at any time and Safe Creative is hoping to show more.

How it Works

If you’re a Safe Creative user (and have submitted text works to the service) you can easily activate and use the service by clicking on the “My Account” link and then visiting “Work Tracking” subtab.

From there, simply tick the box that says “Track the publication of your text works in the Internet.”

Safe Creative warns that it may take several days for results to appear, likely due to the rush of new works to track. However, they provided a screenshot of the page with some sample cases filled in.

To access this report or manage incidents, simply visit the “Work Tracking” sub-tab under “My Account” at any time.

The system will work with all text works uploaded into Safe Creative, including those submitted via RSS.

Some Thoughts

The idea of combining copyright verification and enforcement into one service is a natural one. Copyright holders want and need a one-stop place to protect, track and enforce their works and this brings Safe Creative one step closer to making that happen.

However, this feature is really more based on future promise than what it is actually worth right now. Since any content creator can sign up FairShare free and get many more results per day, there really isn’t much to gain from using the Service through Safe Creative, other than possibly the incident tracking system which, sadly, I can’t offer any commentary on right now.

That being said, the idea is very much there and this is something I’ve sought for some time. I hope that the execution of it improves, making it more useful.

If you are a copyright holder who sees relatively little infringement and primarily works in text, you should definitely take a look at this system as it can be a convenient way to give both proof of authorship and enforce your rights. If you think you might need more than a few results per work, you’re probably better off just signing up for a FairShare account now, even if you have to build a custom RSS feed.

That being said, this will still be a service to watch.

Bottom Line

Safe Creative had it right when it called this partnership a “step further to become a central place on which creators and rights holders can rely to gather as much information about their works as possible.” That is exactly what it is, a step.

The beta version isn’t terribly compelling but this is intended to be more of a proof of concept and that is what it does.

Hopefully this usefulness of this feature will grow and realize its potential. Until then though, most bloggers will be better served just using FairShare as is but it is easy to see a future where that is not the case.

Disclosure: I have done paid consulting for both Attributor and Safe Creative competitor Myows.

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