Thumbs up for ACAP from UK government

“ACAP is well on the way to being adopted as a universal open standard which will benefit everyone with an interest in digital content: large corporations, small corporations or indeed individuals. ACAP is all about maximising the potential of the Internet for making more and more high-quality content accessible and for giving all content providers the motivation and confidence to create and disseminate,” adds Bide.

ACAP is a new open global protocol that aims to put content owners in control of their online content in a way that is conducive to developing new online business models, putting new, high-quality content on the net and to maximizing the benefits of the relationship with search engines.

The major content industry strategy document reads:

An automated content access protocol for the publishing industry

The licensing of information collected from the internet is one issue that has emerged as traditional publishers develop new businesses on line. Pupils may use such content as reference material for their course work. Bloggers may link to it to promote their argument. And aggregators will typically collect content on a common theme from different sources.

Each group has very different requirements, but web-based licensing systems have not kept pace. Consequently, many publishers are not able to tune licences to users' needs as they can with print. And traditional income projections are now unreliable because web based material can be repackaged in different ways without acknowledging the original source. The existing online licensing cannot discriminate between users' needs and has limited application.

A group of international IP experts drawn from newspapers, magazines and content aggregators has been developing a new standard which can be adapted to differing end-uses of content. UK companies played a major part in this work, which has been led by Mark Bide of Rightscom Ltd since 2006. Following a £500,000 pilot to test the concept, a new Automated Content Access Protocol was launched in New York in November for extended commercial use. Its scope will be extended beyond text in the future to include still images, sound and movies.

ACAP is an initiative of the European Publishers Council (EPC), the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and the International Publishers Association (IPA). For more information, go to www.the-acap.org.