Attributor, a silicon valley start up a few years and 32-million dollars in the making, provides an impressive panorama of cyberspace. Employing similar techniques to Google’s search indexing process, Attributor dispatches spiders across the web that search all new content published in the blogosphere and social networks. Its objective in this exploration is to monitor the usage and propagation of copyrighted material and to use this information either to intervene or to study the pathology of viral content.
As might be expected, this business model has quite a bit of traction in the market today. Indeed, Attributor has scored some large contracts for their wide-net surveillance system including Reuters, The Associated Press and the Conde Nast Group.
But what does this type of system foretell about the relationship between the producers of media and those who comment upon and critique it? The arguments posed on the web run rather simply: A. Surveillance technologies like Attributor impede the flow of information by creating circumstances of a de facto, abusive restriction of fair use OR B. Content management technologies like Attributor allow content creators to benefit from their work by having total knowledge of its online uses and either (1) being able to collect credit\revenue from it or (2) to better appreciate the reception of their own work by the public.
Both sides certainly have some points in their favor, but regardless of the synthetic arguments that can be eloquently presented on the issue, there are some underlying creepy forces at play. Marketing materials for Attributor proclaim a near real time awareness of content across 19 Billion pages throughout the web. What are the implications of such a vast, mercenary optics? What do the designators private and public mean when one is applying them to discourse on the web? Certainly everything published and accessible by means of an open hyper text transfer protocol is offered up to the public, but what about an industrial-automated surveillance robot? Is such an entity entitled to interface with the public? Does it have rights? An old world analogue of what Attributor does would involve, let us say, an author writing about new airship technology who quotes a Boeing press release. Consequent to this, Boeing dispatches a van to sit in front of said author’s house and photograph it for a few minutes before driving off.
One must ask, is this a reasonable research initiative on the part of Boeing so that they may understand the architectural and design environments of those people that write about them, or a a type of coercive invasion? How do things change when the case becomes one computer connecting to another instead of men in vans with cameras? Is it more seemly because it is simply a relationship of two machines? Or is something of the first moment preserved? Since it is an actor upon the stage, who is this virtually unknown visitor, what is Attributor?
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