Web-wide business content tracking and programming platform company Attributor has announced the private beta version of FairShare. The program is a free service intended to help help bloggers track their content’s usage throughout the Web – and whether that usage complies with your copyright and licensing requirements.

Late last year, Attributor published a report about tracking the propagation of the content you create. According to the study, many, if not most, of the viewings of a website’s content does not happen on their own page or their RSS feed, but on other sites. They suggest that perhaps only half of the views of your content happen on your own site or via your RSS feed – the rest happen on other sites outside your purview or control.

Enter FairShare, which aims to help you “watch how your work spreads and understand how it is used.”

FairShare works with Creative Commons licenses. It tracks down where, outside your website, your content pops up, how much of your post is used, and whether the page is linked or attributed to you, as well as whether there are display ads there.

The FairShare program returns a list of matches that turn up. If the matched content is Creative Commons License, the feed will also check whether the re-published content complies with your CC license. FairShare is free, and works with over a dozen different languages.

Of course, the program only *finds* sites where your content is being used. If another site uses your content without permission or attribution or is otherwise not in compliance with your licensing, FairShare does not have any fancy filtering capabilities to sort egregious examples from the minor ones. Also, you’re on your own to pursue compliance issues with infringing sites.

Tip o’ the hat to the Blog Herald and Plagiarism Today