Let’s be honest: I found out about this project by misspelling ‘Carpet Project’ with ‘Capret Project’ at Google. But I was really surprising by the result, because the outcome of this small project is very interesting: CaPRet stands for ‘Cut and Paste Reuse Tracking’ and is a mini-project funded by JISC Cetis, the provided code allows an owner of a webpage to track what parts of his page is copied and maybe where it’s used again. But the code also adds author and license information to the copied text, which the user will see after pasting the text to new document.

The developer Brandon Muramatsu describes on his Blog how it works: “CaPRéT uses the jQuery library and a jQuery clipboard extension to monitor the copy event on a given web page. At the time content is copied, the extension adds attribution information that was parsed from the page using a OER license parser (thanks to Pat Locksley’s attribution information for works as you browse. If the page or items on the page are licensed, a CC icon will appear in the URL bar, which can be clicked to display the author and lic">OpenAttribute for Chrome project). In addition, analytics are gathered at the moment content is copied so that even if the user chooses to remove the attribution information, the server still gathers information that indicates the content was used. If the user pastes the code into another webpage (and does not remove the attribution information) then a small tracking code is included which records views of the copied content. There are also some nifty analytics that display what’s happening in real-time, and basic analytics that displays what’s been cut.”

So CaPRet is a small and useful attachment for academic or other webpages, where the owner is interested to track thecopy/paste behavior and like to emphasize this users about the authorship and license terms. A demo site of CaPRet can be found at http://capret.mitoeit.org/, the code is available at Github under https://github.com/tatemae/capret and for further information look at Brandon Muramatsu Blog.