John Pettitt is no stranger to creative work being stolen without attribution. The former Chief Technology Officer and co-Founder of CyberSource and Beyond.com worked for a time as a professional news photographer. He covered the presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004, and remains a member of the National Press Photographers Association email list. Every week, he tells me, there’s discussion about someone who had their photos stolen and published somewhere on the web without credit given or payment remanded. With national-level press photographs, this is a particularly big problem.
These experiences led Pettitt to found Free Range Content and develop Repost.Us, a new web tool designed to simplify the syndication of articles, blog posts, and the associated stories to the point where content piracy is a thing of the past on the web. Pettit has long experience with content pirates, going back to his days as the head of engineering for BitTorrent.
The issue facing Pettitt was how to make syndicating content simple and effective to the point where anyone, not just those publications with the funds to join syndication services such as the Associated Press, could take quality content and republish it where they chose. In years past, the only other way of doing this short of joining a syndication service was to create a business relationship with the company whose content you wanted to syndicate. Go that route, and your request might be ignored or denied if your publication is too small.
“The cost of (syndicating content) is huge,” admits Pettitt, now the co-founder and CEO of Free Range Content, “and what it means is that you never make an agreement with someone who’s small.” This makes perfect sense under the old syndication model; why would you have a business agreement with someone who only has 1,000 readers over someone with 10,000 or even 1 million readers?
Read the original article at Independent Publisher magazine.