Digimarc announced yesterday that it has acquired Attributor Corp.  Attributor, based in Silicon Valley, is one of a handful of companies that crawls the Internet looking for instances of copyrighted material that may be infringing, using a pattern-recognition technology akin to fingerprinting.  Digimarc is a leader in digital watermarking technology, with a large and significant portfolio of IP in the space.  The acquisition price was a total of US $7.5 Million in cash, stock, and contingent compensation.

This is a synergistic and strategically significant move for Digimarc.  A few years ago, Digimarc had pruned its efforts to create products and services for digital media markets outside of still images.  It had decided, in effect, to leave products and services to its IP licensees, companies such as Civolution of the Netherlands and MarkAny of South Korea.  Attributor’s primary market is book publishing, with customers including four out of the “Big Six” trade book publishers as well as several leading educational and STM (scientific, technical, medical) publishers.

Digimarc intends to leverage Attributor’s relationships with book publishers to help it expand its watermarking technology into that market and to move into other markets such as magazine and financial publishing.  The company cited the explosive growth in e-books as a reason for the acquisition.

Beyond that, Digimarc’s acquisition is another sign of the increasing importance of infringement monitoring services; the previous such sign came over the summer, when Thomson Reuters acquired MarkMonitor.

There are two reasons for this increase in importance.  First is the rise of so-called progressive response legal regimes: copyright owners can monitor the Internet and submit data on alleged infringements to a legal authority, which sends users increasingly strong warning messages and, if they keep on infringing, potentially suspends their ISP accounts.  The most advanced progressive response regime is HADOPI in France, early results from which are encouraging.  The Copyright Alert System is supposedly gearing up for launch in the United States.  A handful of other countries have progressive response in place or in process as well.

The second reason for the increasing importance of so-called piracy monitoring is that copyright owners are starting to realize the value of the data they generate, beyond catching infringers.  Piracy is evidence of popularity of content — of demand for it.  The data that these services generate can be valuable for analytics purposes, to see who is interested in the content and in what ways.  Big Champagne, for example, has been supplying this type of data to the music industry for may years.  Attributor has been working on a new service that integrates piracy data with social media analytics; Digimarc intends to integrate this into its own data offerings for the image market.

In fact, we’ll have a discussion on the value of piracy data tomorrow at Copyright and Technology NYC 2012.  Leading the discussion will be Thomas Sehested of MarkMonitor.  There’s little doubt he will be called upon to talk about his new competition.