Automated Content Access Protocol

This ACAP blog is being written at the end of three very busy weeks for the project. I have had a lot of enquiries from journalists, interested in the progress of ACAP following our dialogue in the press with Google, and one question they all seem to want an answer to is “Why are publishers being so slow to implement ACAP?”

This seems to me to be a rather startling question. We published the specification for ACAP only in November last year. Publishers implementing ACAP now are doing so to show that they want and intend to use ACAP in the long term to control the policies they set for the reuse of their content. Implementation now, while it has no practical effect, is just one way of showing support, alongside joining ACAP and pledging technical or financial resources to helping development. While implementation is not a large task technically, as the growing list of sites which have done it shows, it still has to take its place in the queue of tasks to be done. And for the time being, it has no effect until it is also implemented by search engines and other intermediaries. Until this changes, publishers will be expressing their policies in language that no one is actively interpreting.

In these circumstances, it seems to me that the question that journalists should be asking is “How have you persuaded so many publishers to implement ACAP so quickly?” The list is growing all the time – at least 16 countries represented at the last count, and publishers ranging from household names to individual bloggers. And these are just the ones who have told us that they have already implemented. There is an even longer list of publishers who have committed to implement.

How are we achieving this traction? Well, to me it’s pretty obvious. ACAP is an idea whose time has come. Everyone can understand that it isn’t possible to manage content supply on the network in the absence of machine-to-machine communication, and that communication requires a standard language for the expression of permissions and other policies. ACAP has been designed to fill that gap.

Although ACAP is sometimes characterised as being simply about the relationship between a small group of large publishers and a small group of large search engines, the reality is different. Our first set of Use Cases may have had a focus on search, and this is reflected in ACAP v1.0. But it is only 1.0; the beginning, not the end.

Mark Bide, ACAP Project Director

The ability to express much more sophisticated sets of permissions for access and use of content in the network environment in machine readable form is an essential step towards building robust and mutually beneficial business models for content distribution in the 21st Century. Business relationships between content owners and intermediaries have until now been limited to unrefined “bulk” deals. It is always risky to predict future business models, which are created by the complex ecosystem of the market; ACAP is not intended to formulate future business models, but to enable a broader range of more sophisticated and refined potential business models than is currently possible.

We believe that, to this end, the development of open, flexible and extensible enabling standards is a critical component:

• Machine‐to‐machine communication is essential – the scale of the content value chain on the network is such that human intervention in every content transaction is inconceivable
• Communication standards are essential to the effective conduct of many‐to‐many business relationships – the alternative of multiple bilateral communication protocols is unscalable from both cost and manageability perspectives
• Flexibility and extensibility are necessary, because our ability to forecast future requirements in a period of rapid and unpredictable change is low
• Openness is critical to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible; proprietary solutions can only result in a reduction in competition, to everyone’s detriment

What types of new business might result from the development of ACAP, for search engines and publishers working in partnership?

1. Beginning with content that is freely available on the web, ACAP will allow publishers to be more confident about the use to which their content is put, allowing discrimination (for example) between trusted and untrusted partners and between different usages. ACAP will allow (again as an example) time‐based factors to be taken into account in spidering rules, giving publishers much finer control over dissemination of content at different stages in its life‐cycle
2. With content that is currently not publicly available, ACAP will create the technological framework for web site owners to allow access to content behind firewalls (book content,for example) with much finer control of the conditions under which it can be spidered – giving confidence to publishers that they can retain a direct influence over what is displayed to users and other access conditions – thus increasing the publishers’ confidence that in making their content available for search they are not damaging their core business models

You should now have received a personal letter from ACAP Chairman Gavin O’Reilly calling on everyone to implement ACAP. We cannot stress enough how important implementation is at this stage – to put out the message that we all care about how our content is used online. The simple level of implementation which we are asking everyone to undertake is a quick and entirely painless process and has no impact on the functionality or use of your site(s).

The implementation guide is online at http://www.the-acap.org/implement-acap.php

Implementation in general is starting to happen. What we need as soon as possible,
however, is to develop a critical mass, to bring all the players on board and to make ACAP an effective communications tool of your permissions information.