As part of this, I have made it one of my focuses to help content creators find good, legal content to use on their sites. So much so that I made it the focus of my talk at WordCamp Dallas 2009.

One of the recommendations I have repeatedly made was the use of Stock.xchng for free stock images. I continued with this recommendation even after Getty purchased Stock.xchng, even though the purchase made me uneasy.

Though I still think Stock.xchng is a great site for its purpose, it no longer is my favorite tool or my first recommendation. Instead, I’m not now putting my focus on Morguefile, a free stock photo site that is simply a better alternative for most bloggers and other content creators.

Specifically, there are three reasons why I made this choice:

1. Better Licensing: The licensing on Stock.xchng is not longer consistent and many photographers demand additional steps be taken before using an image. While this is their right, the lack of consistent licensing makes it much more difficult to find images. This was a problem I talked about in March and Morguefile’s one license just works better.
2. More Tools: Morguefile makes it possible to resize and crop images on the site, making it faster to get images in the size/format needed.
3. Better Search: Though I really can’t pinpoint the reason for this, the search in Morguefile seems to work better for me. Despite the fact it has a smaller library than Stock.xchng, I seem to get more usable and relevant results with each search.

This is not to say that Morguefile is perfect. It does have a smaller library than Stock.xchng, about 250,000 images to their 400,000 (Morguefile numbers based on not filtering image results) and the ads can be a bit aggressive at times, even though I find them less annoying than the deceptive “premium listings” on Stock.xchng.

For me, Morguefile is now my default stock image site and Stock.xchng will be the backup. It will also be my default recommendation.

That being said, everyone should use what works best for them, but I think Morguefile is the one that will best suit most people I work with.

My only regret is not starting sooner and not taking a closer look at Morguefile after receiving several recommendations to try it. To those of you who did suggest it previously, I apologize for my stubbornness.

I won’t be so daft about recommendations in the future.

On that front, I want to open the door to anyone with recommendations for services to license or find content to use. I’ve covered many here but I know there are others I’m not aware of so, if you have one in mind, please feel free to drop me a line below.

On the Copyright 2.0 Show, I’ve talked several times about how technology is making it so that all-you-can-eat music plans that allow unlimited streaming of music to whatever device you own may, someday, replace having large libraries of files on all of your devices.

On the surface the system seems to be a good idea. Most users pay less money, artists get paid for every play rather than just once for the purchase, piracy would be less of an issue as anyone could listen to any track at any time and we would have access to our music whenever, wherever.

Yet, it’s pretty clear that services such as Rhapsody, which is now nearly a decade old, aren’t exactly setting the world on fire despite being well-established and largely well-respected. So I decided to give Rhapsody a trial, signing up for a 14-day free trial, I wanted to see how life was without “owning” any music and why more people weren’t doing it.

The answer made it clear to me why these services haven’t caught on with the mainstream and why it may be some time before they do.

Getting Started

After signing up for an account and getting my confirmation I decided to jump right in and start listening to some music.

My first disappointment came when I found that Rhapsody was not available as an app for Mac. In fact, in their FAQ, they seem to blow off Mac users by saying:

Our Mac users are important to us, and that’s why we developed Rhapsody Online, a website that lets you listen to millions of songs on your Mac with just a lightweight plug-in.

In short, Mac users are so valuable to Rhapsody that they are going to eschew giving them the choice of an app, like they do Windows users, and force them to use the site. Still, I brushed it aside and moved.

An avid iTunes user, I thought I was pretty well prepared for what Rhapsody might throw at me but it seems I was mostly wrong. There was definitely a learning curve with Rhapsody. The process of searching for music, adding it toi playlists and listening to it didn’t feel very intuitive. It’s only today, after almost a week with the service, I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Some of the issues come from the fact it’s browser-based. Google Chrome, my browser of choice, blocks popups and I struggled for a while to figure out why I wasn’t seeing the player. I eventually had to whitelist Rhapsody to prevent Chrome from just closing out the new window.

Also, the process of building a playlist seems odd to me. Rather than, as with iTunes, creating a playlist and dragging songs into it (often while listening to other music), the only way to do it in Rhapsody is to just queue the songs up in your actual player and save it. To make matters worse, The “Playlists” feature in Rhapsody instead focuses on playlists others have created for your listening, not ones you make for yourself.

The problem is not that making a playlist is difficult, just that it seems to be a buried feature and not intuitive the first few times through.

I then set about my first task, creating a workout playlist for later that evening at the gym, it was then I began to make my way through Rhapsody’s library and putting rubber on the road.

The Library

I punched in a few relevant bands into my search and was pretty impressed by the depth of Rhapsody’s library. It seemed every band I typed in, no matter how obscure, turned up some solid results. But, as I began to add tracks, cracks began to emerge.

First I noticed that Rhapsody didn’t have anything not already in iTunes. For example, my search for the band Rorschach Test turned up their first album but not their second. I had a similar problem on iTunes recently and had to repurchase the second album secondhand from Amazon. The Beatles were not on Rhapsody, but they aren’t available digitally anywhere, and every other iTunes omission was also missing here.

But then some larger cracks began to form. I did a search for Metallica and, though Rhapsody said it had over 700 tracks available (700!?) there were no Metallica songs in their library for streaming. All of the songs they had were covers, mislabeled or just Metallica somewhere in the name.

This was a major problem with Rhapsody. The music library felt like it was in disarray. Every artist had hundreds of tracks listed, even when they only had a few albums. The reason is that, even if you select to search by artist it puts covers of the artist in the results. Compared it iTunes, it felt disorganized and confusing.

This led to another problem, sometimes there were literally too many choices. A search for Joan Jett found 7 versions of “Bad Reputation” with no clear distinction between them. Some were live versions, but others were just rereleases with no clear indication as to which was the most popular or the “real” version. If you don’t know the correct album, you could be hunting for a while on some tracks.

But then there were other cases where key versions were missing, such as with Local H and the tracks off of their “No Fun” EP.

Where iTunes makes it clear which versions you probably want with clear popularity indicators, Rhapsody makes it a guessing game and at least a few times I guessed wrong. Though there is a “Key Tracks” feature on some artist’s pages, it, as with the Playlist creator, is something you have to be actively hunting for and know where to look to really see. Even then, it isn’t always right, for example Joan Jett’s “Key Tracks” didn’t include “I Love Rock N Roll”. To make matters worse, on the “Popular Tracks” list, which seems to be a duplicate feature, the title was misspelled.

All in all, I was glad I was streaming these tracks and not buying them, otherwise, I would have been out at least a few bucks downloading tracks I didn’t want.

The iPhone App

As clunky as the Web experience was for me, I have to admit that the iPhone app was actually pretty slick. It integrated most of the features of the website but in a way that was clear and easily understood. Even on my old 3G the app seemed to move quickly and worked well.

The streaming was only once or twice problem. 3G access in the New Orleans are is pretty good so I had no real difficult keeping the stream going through Rhapsody does permit users to download tracks to their phone for situations they don’t have access. However, since that seemed to defeat much of the purpose of the experiment I haven’t tested it yet.

It is worth noting that the downloads you save using the app are no longer available after you cancel your account, unless you purchase the MP3 separately.

Working out with Rhapsody I noticed no difference than if I had been just using the iPod app on my iPhone. The only major change was that some of the music I wanted to listen to was not available and finding new music to listen to was slightly more tedious due to the larger library of music to go through.

Still, the experience was overall pretty good, especially if I set things up before going in, something I would do with iTunes regardless.

The Debate

The debate that arises from all of this is whether I’ll continue with Rhapsody after the free trial. The answer, right now, is probably not.

I own such a large library of music and have a large amount of it on my phone that Rhapsody seems superfluous. Virtually any song I want to listen to I can just play. This makes the gaps in Rhapsody’s library, no matter how small, very annoying. If I want to listen to Metallica’s “Cyanide” or Local H’s “President Forever” (not the live version) I can’t do that with Rhapsody but I can with my iTunes.

I probably spend less than $10 per month on new music and wouldn’t be saving anything using Rhapsody. But, if I were just starting out and working to build a new music collection, it would be an option to consider. However, it would have to be able to fill in some of the gaps for it to be seriously considered for that purpose.

Right now, there is just too much out there Rhapsody doesn’t have. Combine that with a clunky interface clearly designed more for power users than to be intuitive for newbies and I don’t have any more reason to stay onboard. Not when I have a solution that already works reasonably well for me.

Bottom Line

Despite this, I haven’t given up hope on such a system working in the future. It just clearly is not there now. Though some of the wounds are self-inflicted, namely the interface and lack of a Mac app, most of the wounds are from the music industry in the form of music that can’t be licensed for the service.

What’s clearly needed is a hybrid service that integrates both the “rented” music and the “owned” music. Google Music seems to be exactly that, integrating legally-owned MP3s with a at least some streaming and purchasing.

However, most of what is known about Google Music is really just rumors and even if they are Google’s intentions there’s always a chance they won’t come to fruition.

In the end, Rhapsody paints part of a good direction for the music industry, however, much more needs to be done before it clearly becomes the wave of the future. Meanwhile, overseas, services such as Spotify are moving well past what Rhapsody has done, perhaps showing that the future for music isn’t being carved out in the U.S. at all, but rather, is being forged in the EU and elsewhere.

When it comes to detecting the use of your images on the Web, you have two choices: Watermarking and Fingerprinting

Fingerprinting is taking an image and running an algorithm over it and then detecting similar images to it. Watermarking is taking an image that hasn’t been released, adding something to it (either visible or invisible) and then detecting that watermark as the image is transformed.

Fingerprinting is the technology used by PicScout and Tineye while watermarking is used by Digimarc.

But while both systems can be effective and come with their own advantages/limitations, the solutions for professional photographers tend to be very expensive. Though ImageRights has added in an inexpensive option for artists wanting to use fingerprinting, AdvancedPhotoTools has a similar system for those who prefer to watermark their images.

Entitled SignMyImage, it is an affordable way for photographers and artists to add watermarks to their image and track their use on the Web. However, it doesn’t mean anything. So I’ve put the product to the test and decided to find out how practical the system really is.

The Basics

SignMyImage works similarly to any other image watermarking system. You first download either the Photoshop plugin or the standalone application. For the purpose of this test, I used the latest version of the Windows standalone app on my Windows 7 system.

Before you sign the image, you should first register the application. It will ask for your username, email and a signing code that you wish to use on your images. The code can be up to 10 characters and include letters, capitals, numbers and dashes.

Once done with that, you open up the image you want to sign, in this case I am using a web-formatted image I took while visiting Newcastle, UK for a conference a few years back.

You then click to sign the image and it selects your signature for you (Note: This is just a test signature for this review)

You then apply the signature and, after a few seconds, you get a notice about where the signature has been applied on the image and a visual description of the region. Depending on the size and contents of the image, it may be added to multiple places.

If you have not purchased the app, the program will also add a visible watermark promoting the program in the lower right-hand corner of the image. Purchasing the app will also unlock the batch mode, which will allow you to sign multiple images at once.

You can then post the image online. If you have purchased the app or otherwise have a acquired a license to use SignMyImage’s spider, it will automatically begin scanning for your signature, alerting you to any signed images that it finds.

SignMyImage costs 14.99 Euros for either the plugin or the standalone app or 19.99 Euros. That is about $20 or $26 respectively. Either come with a year of free access to the search spider, which costs 9.99 Euro annually after that, or about $13. Since the spider is simply looking for your signature, you can protect an unlimited number of works with a single account.

The Good

The price is the clearest selling point for SignMyImage. For just $20 for the first year and $13 for each after that, you can protect all of your images including monitoring. Professional photographer routinely pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for similar protection of even small libraries.

For that matter, the technology seems to work fair well. My testing with the app showed that it worked reasonably. I tested both the Windows and Mac version and, though the Mac version moved painfully slow on my older machine, especially when trying to add or detect a watermark, the Windows version moved very quick and light on its feet.

The watermarking itself also seems to work well. Though it isn’t as advanced as Digimarc’s, it does seem to do a decent job. APT provides a sample page with images at various sizes, qualities and with variable amounts of cropping to show how durable the watermark is. All in all, it seems to survive most cropping (remembering it only has to have one signature area intact), compression and resizing within reason.

Also, the German photo site Heise performed a good comparison of SignMyImage against competing products, including Digimarc, and found that their watermark had good durability, though it could not survive rotation.

Finally, SignMyImage claims that their watermark causes less distortion than Digimarc’s though I have been unable to tell the difference myself. However, I am not an image buff by any stretch.

The Bad

The weakest link in SignMyImage is its spider. To date, the spider has scanned just shy of 170 million images. While that may seem like a great deal, remember that Tineye currently scans over 1.6 billion as a free service and without watermarking. However, even Tineye only has a fraction of the Web as Photobucket alone has over 7 billion.

While Tineye has a respectable and growing fraction of images indexed, SignMyImage has only scanned about 1/10th of that.

This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that you can set up SignMyImage’s spider to do custom scanning, focusing on URLs that you think are important. However, this doesn’t help if you don’t have at least some idea where the spider should look.

In short, don’t count on SignMyImage to find all or even a majority of the uses of your work. Though it has found some 1,300 matches to date most, likely, were on the artist’s own site according to APT’s owner. Filip Krolupper.

Also, the signature itself is fairly limited. You are given only ten characters with which to sign the image and that information does not connect to any publicly-available database. If you scan an image signed by someone else, you simply do not know who created it. Compare this to PicScout’s very public ImageExchange platform.

In short, SignMyImage is not going to detect all the copies of your work nor is it going to resolve the orphan works issue. That may make it a solution you don’t wish to invest in.

Bottom Line

Though the watermarking technology itself appears to be good and the price is almost unbeatable, until SignMyImage improves the spider its usefulness as an image detection system will be very limited.

Unfortunately, since the signature doesn’t include any additional information about the creator, it doesn’t solve the orphan works problem either, making it a solution looking for a problem. That’s not to say that SignMyImage is bad, it is only inches away from greatness, but those inches are very important.

The bigger problem with SignMyImage, however, is that it, along with all other watermarking solutions, does little to help artists who already have images on the Web. Though they can re-upload their images and make sure all future copying is tracked, existing copies won’t be and that is a problem that requires fingerprinting.

To that end, hybrid solutions are usually best, but usually impractical given the costs and time.

So while I like SignMyImage as a solution, I can’t heartily recommend it at this time though it is one to watch and see. If they can begin improving their scanning system, they may have the perfect solution for small-to-midrange photographers and artists. or at least a compelling added layer of protection.

As copyright becomes more and more of a hot-button issue on the Web, inevitably more and more authors are releasing books on the topic.

The notable books (and controversial) books on the topic released in the past few years have included Digital Barbarians by Mark Helprin, Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen, The Little Book of Plagiarism by Judge Richard Posner, Remix by Lawrence Lessig and Free by Chris Anderson (which was the subject of a plagiarism controversy of its own) just to name a few.

However, William Aicher is a relatively new addition to this field. Though he has blogged about copyright-related issues on his site for some time, his first book on the topic, a short self-published work, is a relatively unusual entrant into the field.

But what makes Aicher’s book unique isn’t what can be seen on the cover, but rather that it is a book on copyright that manages to avoid being mired in debates on law, philosophy and/or personal anecdotes. Even more impressive, it avoids personal attacks and even comes across as balanced and nuanced.

Though not particularly earth-shattering, it manages to be friendly enough for a casual reader and still have enough to hold the interest of someone more dedicated to copyright issues.

Still, it seems to be a book struggling for an audience and that may be the biggest flaw the book has.

Background

Aicher’s tome is not a lengthy work by any stretch. At only 70 pages not counting forward and introduction, even an average reader can breeze through this on a lazy afternoon.

The book is divided into three parts.

1. Creation: This section discusses the motivations behind creation, monetary and otherwise, as well as the costs of creation and how they are affected by copying.
2. Yours and Mine: Here, Aicher writes about the morals and ethics of piracy and other copyright infringement, saving the strongest sting for those who, according to Aicher, build businesses on the back of infringement.
3. The Future: Finally, Aicher discusses the current legal and market situation and how it may affect creativity in the near future.

The second section of the book is by far the longest, with the third being just one short chapter long, thus making most of the book closely focused on the ethics of piracy, including both the participatory culture created on the Web and the temptation of free works.

Legally, the book focuses by far most of its energy on the DMCA, specifically the notice-and-takedown regime often discussed here on Plagiarism Today. However, Aicher has taken the view that the system has enabled companies to abuse the law to build businesses on the back of infringement while claiming safe harbor.

All in all though, the book avoids delving too deep into the law, you’ll find no citations of famous cases or legal opinions. Instead, the book draws its rather lengthy references section primarily from news articles and other books, including many listed above. There are even a few Wikipedia entries cited, even though that might not be the best source of information for a book to be treated seriously.

But even with the at-times wonky citations, the book does an overall decent job talking about the issues of creation, copyright and ownership and avoids nearly all of the pitfalls other books fell into.

The Good

What makes Aicher’s book stand out is one word: Balance.

In almost every regard, Aicher’s book manages to straddle the line between two pitfalls without veering of course. For example, though Aicher includes anecdotes in his book, including how he used to run a BBS for sharing guitar tabs in a previous life, the book never feels like an autobiography, unlike Helprin’s book. Though there is a great deal of research and citation, it never feels like a stuffy academic paper, like Lessig’s work can at times. Finally, even though he has sharp feelings on the the issues, he refrains from insults and even admits that everyone is trying to think of the artist’s best interest, unlike both Keen and Helprin in their books.

All in all, the book takes an incredibly even keel. No insults, no excess of academia, no nostalgia. Aicher clearly wants his book to be approachable and read by those who disagree with him and works hard to introduce conflicting opinions and rebut them gently. Though his arguments may not be anything earth-shakingly new, the tone and the way they are presented is very refreshing.

On the whole, Aicher’s book is very well-written and easy to read. It manages to float through the topic of copyright smoothly and comfortably. Much like a ship going through an ocean, it doesn’t merely skim the surface nor does it sink into the depths. Instead floats just deep enough to avoid drowning and takes the reader on a three-hour tour of the copyright issues, without winding up on a deserted island.

The Bad

Though the book is, overall, a solid work. There were a few issues I took with it.

For one, though the book’s brevity is not, in and of itself, a strike against it the book’s third chapter is painfully short. At barely ten pages, the discussion about the future would seem to me to be the most important part of the book, the natural climax of the previous sixty. In fact, one could almost call the previous sixty pages a great introduction for a weightier book about the future of copyright and creativity but, just as the discussion gets truly interesting, the book abruptly ends.

Also, there were also a few minor errors in the book. One example is on page 44 where he refers to the Pirate Party as being anti-copyright and seeking to abolish copyright. However, all Pirate Parties, including Sweden’s, to which he was referring, simply favor extreme copyright reform, in this case reducing the term to five years and making non-commercial file sharing legal.

Another error was on page 61 when Aicher said that the law did not require that DMCA takedowns be filed by either the copyright holder or a designated agent and that such a requirement was the creation of Web hosts. That is simply not true. Section 512(c)(3)(vi) states that a notice must including the following:

A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

In short, if you submit a DMCA notice and you are not either the rightsholder or an authorized agent, you are committing perjury. Red flag takedowns are an unrelated issue that have all but been done away with in recent court decisions.

These errors are relatively minor and at least somewhat understandable given the angle Aicher is taking with the subject, but they serve to misstate the current copyright situation ways that are fairly vital.

Still, the technical details of the book play a fairly minor role in the work and the meat of the book is more about the broader issues. There, the book is solid and, even the parts I disagree with, I’m forced to admit that Aicher makes his case both compellingly and entertainingly.

Bottom Line

I want to recommend this book but I am unsure about who to recommend it to. If you’re reading this site, you probably are familiar with the back and forth of the copyright debate and have heard these arguments before, if not pondered them yourself. If you are interested in the copyfight, you either already agree with him or have your counter-arguments lined up already.

This best audience for this book is, in my view, people who have only a passive interest in the copyright debate. It’s a short, quick read that doesn’t lose even the most lay of the laypeople. It is akin to a tourist visit in the copyright wold, a horse-drawn carriage ride through the pro-copyright side of the argument. It sacrifices depth for breadth and quickness and that makes it approachable and at least somewhat useful to those with but a passing interest.

Unfortunately though, this audience isn’t likely to seek out this book or know to look for it. Even if they were given a copy, I doubt many would read it. Your casual file sharer or person that just doesn’t think about copyright isn’t going to sit down and read a book on the subject, even if they can get through in the time it takes to finish a bottle of wine.

Still, if you are interested in copyright you can do a great deal worse than Aicher’s book. Though far from perfect, short and not ground-breaking, it’s a good book to have on your shelf and considering that a paper copy is only $9.95 and a Kindle copy $4.95, it’s cheap to own and takes almost no time. Just don’t expect to be blown away or have your views changed.

It may not change your life, but it certainly won’t make you regret reading it.

In a rare moment of cooperation between the various stock photo agencies, Getty Images, Corbis and Shutterstock have combined their efforts to build a site they hope will educate users about licensing images and the legal complexities of doing so.

The site, stockphotorights.com, highlights the some of the legal dangers that come from licensing photos for your site beyond copyright including privacy issues (model releases) trademark issues and infringement of designs.

The site’s solution to these potential problems is to license images from stock agencies that provide indemnification, or legal protection against claims of infringement over use of their images. This is something that some of the major microstock photo agencies have been doing since late last year.

To be clear, these issues do happen. The Virgin Mobile case, which saw the company use a CC-licensed image of a girl in an ad campaign only to be hit with a privacy claim by the parents of the girl in the image, is an excellent illustration of the problem.

However, they can also be avoided in other ways, such as not using images that contain pictures of recognizable people or trademarked logos not protected under fair use. However, those options are not discussed in the video, in large part because this site, though informational, is aimed at encouraging users to choose commercially licensed stock photography.

Still, the site is a good overview of some of the issues that do arise when licensing images for your site and it is well worth taking the three minutes to watch the video and think about how these problems could impact you.

On that note, I’ve embedded a copy of the video below.

In addition to the video, the site also has a blog with updates on image licensing issues, a list of photography agencies and links to other, related sites, a good list, even if PT is not on it.

In short, if you deal with image licensing at all, you will probably want to watch the video and bookmark this site for future reference. It is almost certainly something you will want to come back to.

Textbroker is a marketplace for custom-written articles. Though such sites are often derided for, allegedly, turning a blind eye to plagiarism, Textbroker seems to be doing something about it. The company has made available a freeware application named UN.CO.VER , which stands for UNique COntent VERifier that it claims can both search for plagiarism within a work and seek infringing copies of the content.

The application is a Java app and can run on Windows, Mac or Linux and is only a 2MB download. It claims to be able to check content that is pasted in, a single URL or even an entire domain in one swoop.

At the encouragement of a a good friend of mine named Angela Swanlund, who was on Textbroker’s mailing list and was offered to use UN.CO.VER, I decided to put the program through its paces and see if it lived up to its description.

The answer surprised even me.

How it Works

UN.CO.VER (UCV from here on) is a fairly straightforward plagiarism checker.

Out of the box you are presented with three options:

1. Check Text: Lets you copy and paste in text for checking.
2. Check Domain: Poorly named, this feature lets you check a single URL. Can set up beginning and ending strings to avoid checking unwanted text such as comments.
3. Check Websites: This feature will attempt to crawl and perform a plagiarism check of an entire Web site, including up to 2 levels deep though more is possible through manual selection.

In all three options, the process is pretty much the same. You set up the scan that you want and click “Check Now”. UCV will then go through the text and find any suspected duplicate content and report it in the space below. The process seems to take just a few seconds per 1000 words and, even in repeated testing, didn’t crash or create any errors.

The question, however, is how well the UCV works. To find the answer, I decided to put it through its paces, testing each option individually.

Where UN.CO.VER Gets Its Results

Before I began the tests, I noticed that the UCV site and manual were unusually tight-lipped about where they were getting their results from, something that made me instantly suspicious. So before doing any reviewing, I decided to find out.

Using a tool called Fiddler2 Web Debugger, I routed all of UCV’s traffic through Fiddler2′s proxy and listened to the Internet traffic.

What I found was that UCV was using Yahoo Search API to find its results. Certainly not a bad way to do it and no reason to be secretive about it, but it is also a system available to everyone.

I also noticed that UCV was looking at the URLs provided by Yahoo and doing some kind of additional analysis as most of the URLs listed in Fiddler2 as being visited by UCV were not appearing in the results. This indicates that UCV may be more than a “dumb” plagiarism checker repeating results from Yahoo.

With that out of the way, I decided to do a few tests of UCV to see how well it performed.

Check Text Feature

To start testing the “Check Text” feature, I began with an article that had a known amount of reuse, namely last week’s column about schools are hurting the fight against plagiarism.

Since UCV isn’t aware I run Plagiarism Today, it should report PT as a complete duplicate and, assuming no other reuse exists, nothing else..

Indeed, that is exactly what happened. UCV reported the original URL on Plagiarism Today and also listed a other URLs that had an extremely small amount of matching content, all of which were false positives triggered by matches for strings such as “to cite sources”.

Next, I tried an old poem of mine that I knew to be widely copied and reused. UCV churned on the work and found seven copies of it. However, two of those copies were on my site, leaving only five potential plagiarisms. However, a quick search on Google easily found a dozen copies of the poem on sites other than mine, some legitimate, some not.

One thing that was impressive was that one of the results UCV turned up was a modified version of the poem that was only about 65% the same. Still, the results overall were incomplete.

Finally, in an attempt to see how it would handle “clean” text, I ran the draft of this article through the service. Surprisingly, UCV found some 24 potential matches though all were less than 5% of the unfinished article and were, once again, for very short strings such as “I decided to put”.

Toying with the sensitivity settings alleviated this problem some, but I wasn’t able to find a good balance between few false positives and good match detection.

Check Domain Feature

Since I already had some idea as to UCV’s matching ability, I decided to simply test this feature on a short story of mine that I knew had a moderate amount of reuse.

I set up the system, being careful to include the beginning and ending phrases to avoid any extra content being searched, and let it do its thing.

Unfortunately, UCV came back with no useful matches, just a handful of false positives. However, a quick search on Google found at least three copies of the work in addition to the one on my site. Though it was clear UCV had parsed the text correctly, it simply did not find the critical matches.

Needless to say, this was very disappointing but it seems to be an issue with UCV’s matching, not the URL check feature as it did work correctly.

Check Websites Feature

Finally, I decided to cut UCV loose on the whole of my site to see what it could do. I told it to check my entire old literature domain and do so 2 levels deep, meaning it should follow links on the home page and links on those secondary pages.

Almost immediately, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of pages missing that should have been included as they were less than 2 levels deep. However, I decided to simply try with what it had and watched as UCV spun.

Unfortunately, that was the first problem. Though UCV seemed fairly quick when doing each item, it felt sluggish when going through so many. Though the time per item was about the same, for some reason the delay just felt that much longer when it was back-to-back with dozens of other works.

I ended up having to stop the search about halfway through as I couldn’t do other tests while this search was ongoing and I had some other checks to make. Still, I had enough time to let it get a few dozen results.

What I found with those results was a combination of a lot of false positives and a lot of inaccurate match totals. Since there was no way to tell UCV to ignore comments, it grabbed a lot of additional, unwanted content on every page and, combined with its sensitivity, threw back almost exclusively false positives and, the few matches it did find that were interesting it listed with lower percentages than accurate.

Without the ability to filter the content indexed, there isn’t much this feature can do. Unless your site exclusively has your own work (meaning no comments and almost no navigation, footer, etc.) then this feature is going to be wildly inaccurate for the most part.

Bottom Line

To be completely honest. UCV performed better than I expected, but only because my expectations were so breathtakingly low. Everything about this application screams “unprofessional” from the broken EULA agreement (that is also in the demo video) to the poor word choices, lack of documentation and amateurish layout. The app looks and feels like it should trip on its own shoelaces and die.

However, it actually does a reasonable job with certain kinds of plagiarism checks. Though my testing was limited, if a work was plagiarized, it did seem to detect it, with the exception of the short story. This means that UCV may be at least somewhat useful for its stated task, checking content for plagiarism, and not trying to find every copy of an original work. Simply put, UCV was just too inaccurate to do that task.

That being said, my greatest concern with UCV is its affiliation with a custom-writing site. Rightly or wrongly, these sites have become known as hotbeds for plagiarism (due in large part to their relatively low payout to writers) and emphasis on rush jobs. This can be seen as an attempt to help writers avoid accusations of plagiarism while engaging in copying that would, if detected, be considered as such.

Whether this is the goal or not is hard to say. But it does seem odd that a custom writing site would offer a plagiarism-checking tool to its writers to check their own work for accidental content misuse.

While mistakes do happen, they are far less common than intentional misuse and that alone makes me feel strange about this application.

Still, looking solely at the merits of the application, it does seem to work reasonably well for what it is designed to do. However, with so many other great tools, including CopyScape and Plagium, already available, I don’t see what the benefit of a standalone application is. Sure, it’s URL checking feature is pretty cool, but it isn’t much easier than just copying and pasting what you need and its full site check is just too slow and too inaccurate to be of much use.

In short, give it a try if you want and consider it a useful addition to your toolbox, but don’t make it your primary checker for any purpose.

Copyright licensing and content tracking firm iCopyright announced earlier this week a new excerpt service for its customers. The service, entitled “EZ Excerpt” is designed to encourage visitors to consider whether they should license the content they are about to copy and also discuss fair use.

iCopyright has been the subject of controversy over fair use issues in the past, most recently regarding Canada’s CBC, and is attempting to mitigate those issues while working to make the licensing process more clear and prominent to users.

The new system, which is already available to current iCopyright users with the latest toolbar installed, attempts to be proactive in reaching out to users by asking for a license, but it remains to be seen if this will be off-putting to visitors or if it will help better explain the licensing process.

How it Works

The basic idea of EZ Excerpt is that it works in conjunction with the existing iCopyright buttons/badges to add an extra layer of protection. When a user goes to copy a portion of an article protected by such a badge, they are given a prompt that asks if the user would like to post the excerpt to the Web.

If the user clicks “Yes”, they are then given the choice of either purchasing a license or clicking a “fair use” link that outlines whether the use is a fair one that doesn’t need a license. iCopyright provides a stock fair use page for this purpose though publishers are free to create their own.

The word count of the excerpt is automatically calculated based on the amount copied and, from that, the cost is tallied. If the user purchases a license, they are given code to embed into their post, including plain text, HTML and HTML blockquote formats.

Once embedded, the quoted content is displayed along with a small iCopyright Logo or ICL (referred to as an ICICLE) that links to a license page. This not only services as a public indication of the license, but also lets Discovery, iCopyright’s content tracking system, know that it is a legitimate license.

All in all, the system seems to be fairly seamless. However, the question is whether bloggers and other excerpters will react positively to this new approach at encouraging licensing.

My Thoughts

EZ Excerpt reminds me a bit of Tynt’s Insight service (formerly known as Tracer) in the way it is activated on the act of copying text. However, where Tynt stealthily alters what is copied to include a link, iCopyright has a JavaScript popup that encourages you to buy a license.

I’ve long been uncomfortable with the way Tynt modifies the clipboard contents without warning, forcing cleanup after it has been pasted (though this feature can be disabled, as it is in Plagiarism Today) and I do feel that iCopyright’s system is a bit more honest. However, it is also more annoying in that popups are almost universally despised and, though a use can just click “No” or “Quit Asking Me” it is still an extra step. Also, clearly, fewer people are likely to pay even a token amount for a quote than include a link back, as with Tynt.

Though iCopyright’s service is more aggressive, it will also likely result in more sales. However, what is less clear is if those sales will justify the annoyance experienced by other users. That will depend largely on the site and how the service is used.

Finally, on the fair use issue, I’m not sure how well the new system addresses it. The fair use link is mixed in with all the information about buying the rights to the excerpt. If one isn’t looking for it, its hard to see and find.

I worry that this approach may confuse more people than it helps. By having the request come up by default, it might seem as if iCopyright has already made the judgement that this not a fair use and is trying to push people into buying a license, not also trying to explain about fair use.

Though the copyright savvy might not see it that way, one thing I know well is that most people are not very copyright savvy, especially on matters of fair use.

Bottom Line

The system is very new, only available for a few days, and doesn’t seem to be widely adopted. It will take some time for adoption level to pick up and then we can see how it is received. In the meantime, it does not seem to be available to users of iCopyright’s Creators service, the one for bloggers and smaller publishers.

Still, I have a feeling that this could be the trend we start seeing when it comes to content licensing, more aggressive and more proactive approaches to the problem. Where traditionally publishers have just added the badges to their site and trusted their visitors to do the right thing, now it seems as if publishers are going to get more aggressive about promoting their licensing options.

Though what iCopyright is doing isn’t technically DRM, it doesn’t do anything to prevent the copying, it will still likely be greeted similarly to it. As the CBC controversy illustrated, many aren’t comfortable with licensing text content by the word, as iCopyright does, and a more aggressive approach probably won’t win any further minds.

That being said though, it may get others to think about these issues and, hopefully, think twice before copying outside of what is allowed by fair use.

Disclosure: I am a former paid consultant for Attributor, a competitor to iCopyright.

Video

The “average” article on Plagiarism Today is between 800 and 1,200 words. While they are certainly longer articles for blogs, they have nothing on the license agreements for many of the most popular services.

YouTube’s Terms of Service has a whopping 4,076 words. Facebook’s has 3,839. Even WordPress.com’s has some 2,924 words, though that includes the “gist” section that summarizes the terms.

Reading through these license agreements can be a major pain, especially considering that they are written almost exclusively in legalese and much of the content is just stock. Separating what is important and unique from what is in every agreement can be very difficult, even for attorneys.

However, an application called EULAlyzer claims it can help. Though it is aimed more at helping you make sense of the license agreements you have to sign when installing software, it can work on any license agreement by drawing your attention to areas that you may want to read more closely.

But does it work? I decided to put it to the test.

How it Works

The idea of EULAlyzer is that you take the agreement, copy it into the program and let it scan it for words that it considers interesting. You can then jump to the relevant passages in the agreement and read them more closely, without worrying about the less interesting parts.

This can, supposedly, save you time when trying to look through a license agreement, or any agreement for that matter, and better understand the most important elements.

All in all, the app is pretty straight-forward though the app does have a pro version for $19.95 that automatically scans EULA’s of any software you install, similar to an antivirus but for license agreements and one that only warns you of issues, leaving the final decision up to you.

All in all though, EULAlyzer doesn’t do anything that you can’t do with the find feature on your computer, but it has knowledge of what to look for built in and that, in turn, can be very helpful, especially to a layperson, when deciding what to look closer at.

However, for the purpose of this test, we’re taking EULAlyzer out of its element, software licenses, and instead looking at it the terms of use for various Web sites, namely YouTube, Facebook and WordPress.com.

The Tests

The first test I did with EULAlyzer looked at the terms of use for YouTube. EULAlyzer found four keywords of interesting including “Advertising”, “Third Party”, “Web Site Address” and “Without Notice”.

The advertising warnings were fairly mundane, all being mentions of YouTube’s well-known advertising program. The third party warnings were more interesting, alerting to how YouTube is protecting itself from the action of third parties and linking to them, but once again not interesting. The website address links were more dull, just linking to other TOS-related pages but the without notice links were extremely useful as it alerted me to changes that can be made without disclosure to me, including changes to the terms themselves.

While this was helpful, there was no mention of licensing or YouTube’s rights over content uploaded at all. Needless to say, this isn’t an issue routinely encountered with software but is a major deal with Web services.

My test with Facebook met with similar results. It identified three worrisome keywords, “Advertising”, “Promotional Messages” and “Third Party” though all three were fairly mundane, though the “Advertising” section did draw attention to Facebook’s privacy settings, an issue they have struggled with. Once again though, no mention of licensing or how your content will be used nor any word on termination of the agreement.

Finally, WordPress.com produces the same keyword matches as YouTube but with significantly fewer results under each match and none of them particularly worrisome. Once again though, no mention of licensing your content or termination of the agreemeent.

The Results

Though I found EULAlyzer helpful with YouTube and Facebook, it didn’t cover all of the bases. This is due to the fact that it is geared toward analyzing software license agreements, not website agreements, and the different needs they have. Still, it was able to highlight some of the better-known controversies involving both YouTube and Facebook’s policies and anyone using the software correctly would have known about the issues.

That being said though, relying on this application to analyze EULAs for web services would be a huge mistake. You’d have to do additional searches for keywords such as “licensing”, “copyright” and “termination” to make sure that you had the complete picture. However, if you know the keywords to look for, you can just use the find feature in your browser to do the search by hand. The only difference is that EULAlyzer also does a decent job ranking the concerns, highlighting areas where you should pay more attention.

So, even though it was incomplete, it was still somewhat helpful. However, there isn’t a lot of reason to use it consistently with Web EULAs at this time. Instead, it should probably stick to its native territory, software agreements.

That being said, I don’t see why it couldn’t be modified, perhaps with a tweaked version, for this purpose. The idea is still very much alive.

Bottom Line

I can’t encourage the use of this for the kinds of license agreements most content creators are worried about, still, for software EULAs it can be a great tool and, with some tweaking, it could be very useful for this purpose too.

All in all, this app is a great idea and, considering that its free, I think it should be on every legally-conscious user’s machine, if nothing else than dealing with those pesky software EULAs.

So, while you shouldn’t rely on it exclusively for any license agreement, especially a Web service one, you should definitely give it a shot as it can help highlight areas of concern and let you make better-informed decisions.

If you want to check your blog for plagiarism, there’s Fairshare (previous coverage). if you want to check your static text for plagiarism, there’s Copyscape (previous coverage) and Plagium (previous coverage). If you want to check your images for plagiarism, there’s Tineye (previous coverage).

But what about your Twitter stream? Up until now there has been precious little.

However, Robby Grossman has developed a new service entitled Don’t Plagiarize Us that it hopes will fill that gap.

The service promises to check your Twitter stream (or anyone else’s) for duplicate tweets and report back on what it finds. However, after putting it through a few paces, I found the results to be interesting, but not altogether useful, especially considering the nature of Twitter and how it works.

Still, it is likely worth a try, especially considering it only takes a second and is completely free.

How it Works

The idea behind Don’t Plagiarize Us (DPU) is pretty basic. You put in your Twitter username, or whatever username you wish to check, and it scans the most recent tweets, usually about ten, and it finds tweets that are similar but aren’t marked as Retweets or replies.

In short, if the tweet is the same or close and it doesn’t contain attribution, the service marks it as suspicious.

One interesting thing DPU does is mark cases that it considers possible “indirect” or “fuzzy” plagiarism. These are cases where the tweets are similar, but not exact, to the source. The idea is to catch people who maybe copied a tweet, but altered a few words or rearranged it in some way.

With that in mind, I gave DPU a few tests and my results are below.

My Tests

For my first test of the service, I decided to run my Twitter account through it. It searched back through over 3000 tweets on the first click and only found three instances of suspected plagiarism, all of them of the “fuzzy” kind.

However, none of the incidents seemed to really be relevant.

For example, it matched my Tweet:

Long day. Time for some Wendy’s.

With this one by @thequestion77:

No baseball practice today. Which is good, cause I’m beat & I have a long day tomorrow. Time for Wendy’s & then some serious lying around

I seriously doubt either was plagiarized and it is almost certain that the similarities are purely coincidental. It was a pattern that fit with the other “fuzzy” matches that DPU handed me.

I then tried the account of my friend and Copyright 2.0 Show co-host Patrick O’Keefe, AKA:@ifroggy. However, this time, DPU only went back ten tweets and failed to find anything. Even after clicking the “Go Back Farther” button a few times, getting back 37 tweets, still nothing showed up.

I then tried a few Twitter celebrities including Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and Diddy (@iamdiddy).

Kutcher’s account produced a lot of matches though almost all were “fuzzy” ones that had little significance. There are also false negatives, exact quotes listed as fuzzy ones, and several cases where tweets were in the list twice.

Diddy’s account was less interesting, having found only one duplicate tweet, after going back about just 20 tweets. This one was an exact match that appears to be from a Twitter bot that took Diddy’s tweet and reused it without attribution. This is, most likely, the only true plagiarism I found.

Finally, in the name of fairness, I also ran the creator’s account through DPU. After going back almost 1800 tweets the system found a slew of similar tweets though, once again, the majority were simply “fuzzy” matches that were almost certainly not plagiarisms and the exact matches were far too short to be useful, less than six words.

Of all the copies of his tweets, only one was interesting, but it seems to be a retweet that was missing the attribution, not an attempt to plagiarize as it was just a promo for a livestream.

Thoughts on the Service

After all of this testing, the impression I walked away with was that it was a neat idea for a service, but one that was extremely flawed.

First, the matching did not seem to work very well. As I mentioned above, the fuzzy matches were almost completely useless and even the verbatim matching was often too short to mean much. A service like this would clearly have to focus more on quality, not quantity of matches given the shorter length of tweets and the sheer volume of them.

Also, the service itself seemed unreliable. When I initially tested it I received error messages but, at the encouraging of the creator, I gave it a second try and did indeed find it working, for about 3/4 of my tests. Far too often I was greeted with a notice like this one:

The errors were fairly random and I could often just go back and try my query to fix it, but they were still frequent enough to be extremely annoying.

However, the bigger problem is with Twitter itself. The nature of the service, with tweets under 140 characters, most of which are mundane in nature, and billions of Tweets being passed around, it is almost inevitable that there will be similar tweets without any malicious intent.

Though the service does a decent job ignoring retweets and replies, two elements that could have greatly messed with the results, the fact is that there is still so much coincidental matching that there is little hope for separating the actual plagiarisms from the coincidences and, even if you can, there is little one can do as, in most cases, tweets likely aren’t protected via copyright.

Still, this isn’t to say you shouldn’t give this service a try. It is a fairly cool idea and it is is a great way to see who is tweeting about similar things to you. It might not help you catch a plagiarist, but you might find a few cases where a retweet went sour or people were talking about the same topic as you.

It could, if nothing else, be a new way to meet people on Twitter.

Bottom Line

The system is a neat idea but I don’t think it has much practical use now. With some tweaking it could become more useful for Twitter plagiarism detection though it is unclear what one would do about that in the majority of cases.

The site does mention that they are working on “real time monitoring” of Twitter plagiarism, a feature that could be very useful for those whose tweets are often copied without attribution, but I suspect that the usefulness of that service will be limited to only certain kinds of Twitter users.

All in all though, definitely give this service a try. Even if it isn’t the most useful, it’s free and can still provide some interesting information.

Copyright non-repudiation service Myows announced an API challenge for developers last week. The idea is that the developer who generates the best plug-in, add-on or standalone application for their API, meeting the criteria in the announcement, will a prize, namely an Apple iPad.

The runner up will also receive an iPad and all of the applications will also be put before a jury of “industry heavyweights” to award a jury’s prize of $1,000.

Specifically, any submitted application or plugin must do the following three things:

1. Use the new Myows API to develop a plug-in, add-on or stand alone application that assists other Myows members in registering, protecting and/or managing their rights
2. Develop this solution in a way that allow users to access key functionality in 4 steps or less
3. Implement your code and design with integrity, simplicity and elegance

If you are interested in competing, Nettuts+ has two videos to help you along. The first shows you how to register a new application and the second how to build a very basic app.

For those interested in competing, the deadline is May 15. One can submit an application by posting to the API category in the Myows forum. Public voting will take place between the 15th and the 31st and the jury award sometime after that.

I look forward to seeing what interesting applications people come up with for this challenge. Personally, I am hoping for a good WordPress plugin.

Disclosure: I am a paid consultant for Myows.