A website called Defend Fair Use just launched alleging that large media and content companies are misrepresenting consumer rights under copyright law. This initiative is led by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a nonprofit back by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo among others.

While we welcome more discussion among these players about the contours of consumers’ right and copyright law, it’s ironic that the same companies alleging exaggerated copyright notices are profiting from duplicate content.

“Big Content” and “Big Technology” are clearly trying to spin the issue. To clarify, let me breakdown the four factors of Fair Use and show where Attributor can provide objective metrics to guide Fair Use determination . . . without boring you to death.

Factor 1: The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature is for nonprofit educational purposes.

Detectable. While Attributor won’t identify if the usage is transformative, we automatically detect if the page on which reuse occurs has advertising present. As evidenced by recent moves by the New York Times, advertising is clearly driving the online content economy making commercial use an increasingly important factor.

Also, you can learn a lot about the purpose and character of a use by whether or not attribution is provided, which in the online world, amounts to links from the copy to the original – we report back on attribution for every match we find.

Factor 2: The nature of the copyrighted work

Not Detectable. Sorry, we can’t determine whether your content is fiction or non-fiction, but we’ll add it as a feature request!

Factor 3: The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

Detectable. This is a fancy way of saying that the less of your content that is taken, the more likely it qualifies as Fair Use. For each match, we report back on the percentage of the original content that has been reused.

Factor 4: The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Detectable. Not only will we indicate if ads are present on the reusing site, but we will also provide the amount of monthly traffic for the site. We’re also adding functionality that will help you understand the impact of content reuse on your ranking in search engines. As noted in our Harry Potter research, much of content reuse is occurring on sites that appear higher in search engine rankings than the original content owner. This can have a major impact on the relative market value of the original work.

Attributor won’t remove all the emotion from the room in copyright discussions, but it will provide an objective means to evaluate Fair Use disputes and (hopefully) result in less litigation and less posturing between “Big Content” and “Big Technology”.