Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Dow Jones and Briefing.com Settle “Hot News” Lawsuit

First off today, Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corp, has settled its copyright lawsuit with Briefing.com. Dow Jones accused the site of lifting over 100 headlines and snippets from their site, violating their “hot news” right over news that ha been gathered at expense. The claim of hot news is a controversial one in this case that many wanted to see more rigorously tested in court as it was first introduced in the early 20th century, has been rarely used since and expands copyright, in a limited capacity, over facts and information, elements not normally copyrightable..

2: Cooks Source, Sunderland Magazine Mired in Copyright Controversy, Ceases Publication

Next up today, Cooks Source, the New England magazine that became the subject of a Internet attack after it lifted a story from Monica Gaudio and responded to her via email claiming that the Internet was “public domain”, has announced that it is closing down. Editor Judith Griggs has said that she was sorry for her lifting of the article but wished that a more balanced view of the incident had been told. Griggs said nothing about the over 100 other cases of suspected misuse of content from other sources that others have found in the magazine, but did say they were closing up shop effective more or less immediately

3: Google, Hachette Ink Accord on Book Scanning

Finally today Google and France’s largest book publisher, Hachette, have signed a deal to allow Google to scan some 50,000 French titles into its Google Book Search product. However, the deal gives the publisher a great deal of control over pricing of copies of the book that are sold via Google. This is in sharp contrast to the U.S., where Google has battled with publishers in courts for the right to scan books and has a settlement with the Authors Guild that is yet to be finalized.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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Tune in every Wednesday evening at 6 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

covered a new startup in the copyright verification field

However, Myows is far from the only service that that is providing instant, unofficial verification of ownership of created works. The non-repudiation field has exploded in recent years. Gone are the days of expensive registries that rivaled the Copyright Office in price (while still being unofficial in nature) as now we have fast, cheap, services that offer to preserve your work and your claim on it.

But even there these services have grown, no longer merely providing a certificate of ownership, but branching out to provide help with licensing and even with infringement resolution.

So which service should you use? It’s a tough question that depends heavily upon what your specific needs and wants are. To help make the process a little bit easier, I’ve created a chart, which I’ve embedded and linked to below, to help you decide which of the services are right for you.

The Companies

Specifically, I decided to compare the services provided by five different sites. Myows, SafeCreative, Numly, MyFreeCopyright and Registered Commons. They are five of the biggest and best-known services in this field and all have been covered on this site in the past.

A notable omission is C-Registry.us, which is more of an orphan works protection service than a non-repudiation one, though it has some functionality as such. Also, since C-Registry is targeted almost entirely at artists and photographers, making it much less useful to bloggers and other types of creators.

However, if you are a visual artist, it is likely a service that is well worth looking into, especially if you sell stock photos.

I then took a look at the companies based up on some of the most popular and requested features. The results are embedded below.

The Chart

Click for Full Size

Link to Google Doc

*Extension is out of date.

Definitions

Very quickly, I want to clarify the meaning of the elements in the chart and what they mean.

1. Cost: The cost of the service.
2. Types of Work: The kinds of files/content that can be uploaded. If a service allows “files” there is no separation between different content types.
3. Works Fingerprinted: Refers to creating a hash of a file that can be compared against later. This is often how works are verified or identified at a later date. It does not involve any visual mark on the work (watermarking) or additional tag. It’s just a unique hash of the file or work’s content that will match other copies of the work.
4. Works Stored: Are the works themselves stored on the service for backup and/or later viewing.
5. Certificate Provided: Whether or not the service provides a printable certificate for easy verification.
6. Barcode Provided: Refers to a machine-readable barcode, commonly used on physical objects.
7. Public Verification: Refers to the ability of someone unsure of the ownership of a work to submit a copy of it (or other known information about it) and see who owns or created the work.
8. Custom License/License to Individuals: A custom license is your ability to draft your own license or set new restrictions on use. The ability to license to individuals is the ability to give a person or company a license to use the work and track that license in the system.
9. Creative Commons Compatible: Whether or not users can select CC licenses.
10. Contact Author: A means to contact the author within the system, not just a profile used by the author.
11. Detection/Resolution Assistance: A Means to detect copies of the work and assistance in bringing about a resolution.
12. API Available: A means for programmers and other service providers to interact with the service, including submitting works. Some may be in private beta at this time.
13. Firefox/WordPress Extensions: Add-ons for the Firefox browser and WordPress blogging platform.
14. RSS Integration: The ability to read content from a site’s RSS and automatically register it, very useful for bloggers.

Beyond the Chart

Though the chart does an overall decent job at comparing the various features to one another, there are a few things that aren’t displayed on the chart that are worth mentioning.

1. Myows is a clear winner on the ease-of-use front, having designed a system that is both attractive and easy to use. Great for those who aren’t familiar with these kinds of services.
2. Safe Creative has a robust API and, through it, has partnered with music sharing site Jamendo to protect the works uploaded to the site.
3. Registered Commons is extremely difficult to use and is targeted mostly at creators of larger, more involved works, as the pricing strategy indicates. It also has a very powerful system for verifying author identities to provide further proof of ownership.

In the end, all of the services have their separate strengths and weaknesses. Myows, for example, is the only service to provide resolution assistance and has great handling of licenses. However, there is no public verification of works. Safe Creative is extremely feature-rich, having at least some capability on all fronts but can be confusing and intimidating to use.

Numly, on the other hand, focuses on speed and simplicity though some of its best features, its extensions, are dated and it does cost money to use it with an account large enough for most creators. MyFreeCopyright is the only one with RSS integration, which makes it invaluable for bloggers, but only has minimal licensing features and doesn’t provide certificates for content other than Web-based ones.

Finally, Registered Commons has a very robust hashing system and very powerful user identification service but all of it comes at a high cost and with a very difficult interface.

All in all, it seems every service has a great deal to offer users and a great deal to learn from others.

Bottom Line

So it all comes back to the question of which service should you use. The answer is obvious: It depends.

From where I’m sitting, both Myows and Safe Creative are clear leaders in this field. Myows is well-aimed at novices and those interested in copyright enforcement where Safe Creative is more aimed at veteran users and those who need public verification and in battling the orphan works problem.

However, I use MyFreeCopyright on this site due to its RSS integration (no reason not to) and have used Numly in the past through its WordPress plugin. Finally, Registered Commons would likely be best used by those creating works that may be considered valuable financially as their identity verification program and strong hashing may provide greater security, but at a price that isn’t practical for most.

On that front though, I am interested in your thoughts. Which do you think is the best and why?

Disclosure: Chris Matthieu, the owner of Numly, is a long-time friend and former co-host of the Copyright 2.0 Show.

It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automattic’s WordPress.com. Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, WordPress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have.

Though there have been spam attacks in the past, the spammers have been easily shut down and, overall, the service remains relatively free of the splogs that seem to choke up its competitors. Though paid services such as Typepad also enjoy a relatively spam-free existance, what WordPress.com does is very rare for a free service.

To find out how WordPress.com achieved this, I emailed Automatic’s founder, Matthew Mullenweg. The answer was very surprising.

A Technological Edge

Automattic, in addition to creating WordPress.com, created the anti-comment spam plugin Akismet.

Akismet works by taking comments submitted to a site and forwarding them to Akismet’s servers. Akismet then, using a series of tests and filters, determines if the comment is legitimate, spam or something in between. Spam comments are filtered out, gray comments are held for moderation and legitimate comments are posted.

Akismet is available for free for personal use on any WordPress blog with an API key, not just those hosted by WordPress.com. To date, Akismet has stopped over one billion spam comments and is used on thousands of blogs, including this one.

Both the WordPress.com site and Mullenweg hint that Akismet is one of their tools for keeping spam blogs off of WordPress.com. Though both are vague with their descriptions as to how it works, one likelihood is that any caught comment spam originating or pointing to a WordPress.com flags the site for inspection.

If true, this effectively turns comment spamming, one of the most popular means of promoting a spam blog, against the person doing it. Comment spamming goes from being a tool to help search engines find a blog to a means for administrators to easily identify the blogs that are likely junk.

That would be an interesting reversal of fortune for spammers and a very intelligent use of a seemingly unrelated technology.

Goodbye, Adsense

In late 2005, WordPress.com took what some considered an extreme step and banned Google Adsense as well as other advertising networks from its service. As of this writing, there is no way to add any advertisements to a WordPress.com hosted blog, other than “discreet” links, without a paid VIP membership.

This is obviously a tremendous deterrent to spam blogs, many of which rely upon Google Adsense to make money. This is in stark contrast to Blogspot, which makes it very easy to add Adsense ads to your blog and encourages members to do so.

Though Google’s reasons for doing this are clear, it is how they make money from the service, the prevalence of Adsense has undoubdtedly been a major contributor to the deluge of spam that has befallen the service. That is also why Mullenweg, in a comment on TechCrunch, said the following:

We’re considering ad options for the future, but for now disallowing adsense has been a huge help in keeping splogs off the system and hasn’t gotten much pushback from regular folks, only aspiring pro-bloggers. (Who should probably be on WordPress.org anyway.)

While it is true that this has no impact on the spam bloggers that are solely interested in using the splogs to gain search engine ranking via outbound liks, this missing functionality does a great deal to deter many of the laziest and least sophisticated spam bloggers out there.

All in all, while the lack of simple monetization might be a hurdle for some would-be WordPress.com users, it has played a critical role in keeping the service free of spam blogs.

The Real Difference

But while Mullenweg was clearly pleased with the role that Akismet and other tools played in stopping spam, he put the greatest difference on the human element.

According to him, Automattic takes spam very seriously and always has and that, in his view, makes the greatest difference of all. In his email to me he said the following:

If you ever come across something we host that’s spam just drop the link there and someone will look at it within an hour or so.

Akismet and a few other internal tools help, but I think it’s mostly that we take splogs pretty seriously and respond accordingly..

Mullenweg encourages people to use the “Report as Spam” feature in the dashboard across the top of all WordPress.com blogs to report any instance of spam. He says that all reports of spam are tracked and followed up on swiftly.

This is much simpler and more effective than Google’s complicated and practically useless reporting procedure.

This, in Mullenweg’s view, has kept spam from establishing a foothold on the service and kept WordPress.com relatively spam-free when compared to its competitors. Hopefully, it will be enough to keep it that way.

Conclusions

The good news in all of this is that it is possible to run a large-scale, popular and free blogging service that is relatively free of spam. The bad news is that there is no magic bullet in any of this.

Running such a service requires a great deal of commitment both from the people who run the service and from the community that uses it. It requires investing both resources and manpower into combating spam while having a genuine dislike for it. It even requires, in some cases, sacrificing features that legitimate users may want in order to make the service less appealing to the spam blogging community.

It also means that it may be far too late for Blogspot and similar services to turn the tide against spam. Though WordPress.com seems to easily be able to keep up with new spam that comes in, it appears that, if over three quarters of your results are junk, that the reversing the tide is all-but-impossible.

However, if Google were to take the simple, but drastic, step of banning Adsense on Blogspot, the effect on spam blogs would be drastic. However, the effect on their legitimate bloggers would be equally dramatic, causing many of them to turn away from the service.

This puts Google, and the other free blogging services, in a very tough bind. In order to effectively combat spam, they need to make sacrifices that will, most likely, cause them to lose legitimate customers as well as spammers. It almost comes down to a choice between being a spam haven and having their entire business model destroyed.

In that regard, spam blogs are like a cancer, often easily treated if caught and attacked early, but incurable if allowed to go on to long. Sadly, Blogger, AOL Hometown and MSN Spaces may be beyond any hope of recovery.

This is an issue I will be revisiting some time later this week.

Update: This article has really taken off. An appearance on Techmeme as well as Matt Mullenweg’s blog have really drawn a great deal of attention to this. So welcome to everyone who is visiting this site for the first time. Feel free to look around some and subscribe to the feed if you wish.

I did want to take a moment and respond to one very astute commenter who pointed out that all is not what it seems with the Blogspot study. As it turns out, the methodology of the study is both buried and confusing. It turns out that 77% of Blogspot blogs are spam for spam-friendly keywords. It is not a reference to the number of spam blogs on the service over all.

However, after thinking about it, I realized that a study of the blogs on Blogspot would be almost useless as Blogspot, in addition to splogs, is choked down with with inactive and abandoned blogs, the same as with any free blogging service or free Web service in general.

A better study would be to look at the percentage of active blogs on the service, something that can be determined, at least with some distinction, but the number of outgoing pings. A study from February of this year looked at exactly that and found that 51% of all pings from Blogspot were spam (Note: According to Pete, this study was taken before Blogspot began pinging new entries by default, it may show bias to spammers as they might be more likely to switch on the pinging feature. We will have to wait and see when a new study comes out.).

This means that over half of all new posts created and pinged out over Blogspot are junk. Though not the 77% mentioned earlier, that is still a tremendous problem. The fact remains that Blogger is, quite clearly, overrun with spam blogs and is unlikely to recover any time soon, not without making drastic changes.

My thanks to Pete for pointing out the error.