Pay close attention to the fate of Attributor, whose software tracks a web publisher's content as it wafts across the Internet. Many bloggers think nothing of copying and pasting (for example) recipes and song lyrics into their own posts. if those recipes or song lyrics are copyrighted, their owners have the right to be paid if their material is republished.
I know we at SWMS would like broader distribution of our tech media analysis content, but we're a paid-subscription site, so in order to be fair to paying subscribers, we can't just spray our stuff all over the place. By the same token, Attributor software could help us develop new paid subscribers by "reporting back to us" about people who received and read our content. Every notification would be a potential sales call.
The New York Times and TechCrunch covered Attributor this month. Good reading.
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