Attributor

About Attributor

Attributor Corporation was established in 2005 by co-founders Jim Brock, who served as CEO, and Jim Pitko, the chief technology officer. Brock brought experience from his time as a senior vice president at Yahoo!, while Pitko was the former CEO and chairman of Moreover Technologies. The company positioned itself as a service for content creators to monitor and protect their intellectual property online.

The firm's core business revolves around scanning the internet for text, audio, video, and images belonging to its clients. It utilizes a digital fingerprinting technique, which the company refers to as Attributor "DNA," to match client content against its extensive index of web pages. This allows content owners to identify where their material is being used. Clients include major publishers in the book, magazine, and financial sectors. One of its first major clients was the Associated Press (AP), which initially used the service to monitor text with plans to expand to photos and video.

Attributor's system provides clients with alerts and the context of how their content is being used. When unauthorized use is discovered, the platform offers several recourse options, from requesting the removal of the material to arranging licensing agreements. This system was designed to bring transparency to the online content economy and help publishers protect the value of their assets. The company's primary market has been book publishing, serving several of the world's largest trade book publishers as well as educational and scientific publishers.

In December 2012, Attributor was acquired by Digimarc Corporation for a total of $7.5 million in cash, stock, and contingent compensation. Digimarc, a specialist in digital watermarking technology, saw the acquisition as a strategic move to expand its own technologies into the book publishing market, especially with the growth of e-books. The acquisition integrated Attributor's content monitoring and anti-piracy services with Digimarc's digital watermarking capabilities.