CBC tracking copying and pasting from its website with Tynt Insight

The CBC has introduced a pilot feature to its website allowing it to track how many users copy and paste from news stories and what material is lifted. The tracking technology is provided by Calgary company Tynt Multimedia Inc. Tynt Insight, formerly known as Tynt Tracker, is a program that allows website and blog users to see which words—and how many—are copied from the original source into an email, text processing document or another website. The service does not provide clients with information about who copied the material, the company says. Tynt also automatically inserts a “read more” link into any pasted text longer than eight words. The link redirects the user to the original website. The CBC introduced a licensing option on its website about a year ago in an attempt to draw revenues for the reproduction or distribution of its online content. Seattle company iCopyright is providing the CBC with a service that asks users to license material before they email, republish, post or print content, which may involve paying a fee. A for-profit user would pay $250 to post an article for a one-month period; a one-year post costs $500. CBC spokesman Jeff Keay said Tynt’s tracking services and the corporation’s licensing policy with iCopyright are two separate features. “Our objective has nothing to do with the iCopyright website,” he said. But John Lawford, counsel with consumer advocacy group the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), said the CBC could use Tynt Insight to track down websites that infringe copyright. “If they find a site that seems to have a lot of their content … they can say there’s no way you got it off our site without violating our terms,” he said. In Canada, the National Post, owned by Canwest Global Communications Corp., is also using Tynt’s services, but Canwest was not available for comment Tuesday. Tynt’s data collection uses javascript in the code of news stories. According to Tynt CEO and co-founder Derek Ball, all user IP addresses collected by the company are purged “pretty fast.” “We do roll-ups every 24 hours and aggregate the data,” he told The Wire Report in an interview. According to Tynt’s website, an average of six per cent of page visits involve an action—such as copying—that can be tracked by its services. The company says the average length of copied material is between 200 and 300 words. Although it also tracks the copying of images, it does not provide data on the practice on its website. Tynt’s webpage says its service helps website owners “get credit when your content is copied,” to “see what sites are promoting your content,” and “measure and understand user engagement.” “We have been testing to see if knowledge of what the users are engaging with can be beneficial to the publisher, in terms of where they are going to place their content,” Ball said. Tynt Insight is currently free, but the company is launching a pro version that will allow clients to view real-time data. Tynt has noted that the stories most often copied are not the most popular. Often they are more specialized, niche articles. “But we are seeing some very interesting variations in that data. Certainly the news and entertainment news are highly copied content,” Ball said. Keay said the CBC is using Tynt to measure what is being copied and pasted as well as to get people to link back to the website, increasing traffic. Tynt’s website says its script can be blocked by Firefox users through Adblock, and by Internet Explorer users through Super Ad Blocker. Ball said Tynt is working on a way for Internet users to block Tynt Insight from working on their browsers. “It’s actually implemented already on a site-by-site basis, so if you go to , you will see in the FAQs that there is a link you can push. Tynt then just goes to sleep ,” he said. “If somebody doesn’t want to be tracked, then we don’t want their data.” Keay said Tynt Insight does not raise privacy issues because the program does not collect personal information. On the privacy section of its website, the CBC notes that it may track user behaviour. “CBC does reserve the right, however, to perform statistical analyses of user behaviour and characteristics, in order to measure interest in and use of the various sections of its sites so as to improve design and navigation and to gather marketing information. Only aggregated data from these analyses, not individual data, will be used for this purpose,” it says. Tynt launched on March 1, 2009 with $3.9 million in funding from iNovia Capital, AVAC Ltd. and angel investors. As of last July, its clients included the New York Daily News, Hearst Corp., Time Inc., Politico, the Wall Street Journal and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “We are currently tracking 400,000 sites around the globe right now and we are tracking many billions and billions of page loads,” Ball said.

CBC tracking copying and pasting from its website with Tynt Insight

Broadcast | February 2, 2010

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