iCopyright, a company that helps content providers license their content, has announced a new service entitled Discovery, that allows publishers to track where their content is used.

According to the press release, linked above, the service will search the Web for copies of the content, provide the creator with various means of redress and then monitor the site for compliance.

The service is not currently available with the iCopyright for Creators service, previously reported on here, but will be shortly. If you are not currently a user of the site, it may be a good time to sign up.

I have sent an email to iCopyright and I hope to gain access to a demo version so that I can test the service and provide a more thorough write-up shortly. Expect a review in the next couple of days.

Some Personal Thoughts

My first thoughts are that I am very excited about this service. iCopyright is a well-known and well-respected name in content licensing. Though their Creators service lacks functionality that prevents me from taking advantage of it, I highly recommend it to those that do not use CC licenses.

The pairing of licensing and detection services is a natural one, especially for larger customers that need to streamline the entire content control process. Whether bloggers and smaller users will benefit from this remains to be seen.

Though the press release makes it seem as if iCopyright functions similarly to other services such as Attributor, Blogwerx and other copy detection/resolution tools, its pairing with a strong license structure may give it an edge.

However, the real test of this service is going to be how accurate its detection is, how easy it makes it to handle unlicensed copies and how much value it is able to provide users. Until I’ve used the service, I won’t know.

Conclusions

If you haven’t signed up for iCopyright for Creators yet, now might be a good time. The licensing functionality is strong out of the box, especially for those who don’t use Creative Commons, and the promise of licensing, detection and cessation in one platform is compelling.

However, there are a lot of unanswered questions right now about the service including effectiveness, cost and features so I am not ready to get too excited. Still, it is worth noting that this will be available soon and could be a great boon to content creators.

I’m looking forward to giving this a more thorough review and updating this site with more information later.

Disclosure: iCopyright has contributed to this site. I am a consultant for Attributor.

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