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Media - Friday, March 23, 2007

Audible Magic Clearing The Table By Cleaning Up Copyrights. But Attributor Is Looming Competition.

Over the past week we have heard a lot about a Silicon Valley startup called Audible Magic. That's because with each passing day we get news of major online media companies feeling the pain through accusations of copyright abuse. Google's YouTube felt is this week with the launch of the new anti-YouTube consortium and today Microsoft shut down its Soapbox video service while it cleaned up its copyright protection act.

Audible Magic scans online files for copyrighted material, checking against its database of audio and video content published by recording, movie and TV studios. After analyzing the digital fingerprints, Audible Magic determines whether the material has been authorized to be shared or not.

Audible Magic is primarily backed by a small Naples, FL, venture capital firm, Tierra Del Oro, which has invested an undisclosed amount of seed capital in the company. The VC firm is run by Addison Fischer who is Chairman of SmartDisk (NASDAQ: SMDK) and who has also made VC investments in RSA, Oak Technology and Verisign.

Sitting in the cat-bird seat is a startup called Audible Magic which has been selling its copyright cleaner tech to sites at risk like Sony's Grouper, Myspace, Break.com, Microsoft's Soapbox channel, and Revver.com. YouTube may me using Audbile Magic but will not confirm the story.

Audible Magic competes with Gracenote, Advestigo, Auditude, Attributor and Vobile.

Redwood City-based Attributor in December closed Series B for a total funding amount to date of $10M. The latest round was ed by Sigma Partners, the round also included previous investors: Selby Venture Partners, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus Capital.

The company's co-founders are former Yahoo exec Jim Brock, and Jim Pitkow who sold Outride to Google and last year sold Moreover Technologies to VeriSign (he was Chairman of both companies).

While it is well behind Audible Magic with clients and experience, Attributor claims to go further. The company says it will has over 10B Web pages that it can scan for copyright infringement.

Read - Audible Magic on Copyright Patrol (AP)