Beating back the aggregators? They wish

Publishers -- principally newspaper executives -- rage about aggregators who repost their content online, with or without links. Said publishers can be heard to mutter into their Scotch and water that these guys are "stealing" their "intellectual property".

Recently, the Associated Press announced it would be taking steps to prevent "illegal" use of their content, though they haven't revealed how they will track such behaviour, let alone enforce their will.

Well, according to an article on Forbes.com, two start-up companies in California have come up with products for dealing with those pesky* appropriators.

• Scribd is a social publishing company that, with its iPaper software allows publishers to post issues to their websites inside a widget; a blogger can only extract the document through the widget, which tracks which sites use it. The idea seems to be more aimed at book and other document publishers, but could work equally well and selectively for some newspaper and magazine sites.

• Attributor has digital publishers upload all their content to a master database then continuously searches the web for telltale strings of words (in this, it is a little like the plagiarism software Turnitin used by universities) then sending demands for users to pay a fee or take the articles down. The company's chief executive says it is useful for wholesale theft of articles rather than fair use of headlines and excerpts.

*Yes, we recognize that this blog is one.