Earlier this week Phil Barker wrote a blog post about the intriguing cut and paste attribution tool developed by the CaPRéT OER Technical Mini Project. CaPRéT has been developed by Brandon Muramatsu of MIT and Justin Ball and Joel Duffin of Tatemae. Brandon has now written a blog explaining how the team scoped and developed the alpha release of the CaPRéT tool and also 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 the OER license parser. In addition, analytics are gathered at the time 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.

You can find Brandon’s blog post here CaPRéT: Getting to the Alpha Release and the CaPRéT code is available to download from github.