The following came from a session at the 2008 Online News Association Conference about
ACAP (the Automated Content Access Protocol):
According to ACAP Program Director Mark Bide, copyright laws in place now worldwide have largely worked and are still effective. But in the digital age, we largely lack the necessary tools to make copyright laws
really work on the Web. In the United States, our main copyright enforcement tool is litigation, which is – let’s face it – really expensive and time consuming. (Or a headache for all involved; reference the
AP vs. Drudge Retort fiasco from earlier this year.)
ACAP is essentially a few lines of code on Web pages. The idea behind ACAP is that publishers of all types of media would be able to pre-emptively deal with copyright issues by telling search engines what (and when) to crawl content.
Frankly, very few people read the “terms & conditions” on Web sites, anyway. ACAP, Bide said, will ultimately make all publishers more confident about putting their content online, and it will facilitate new business models while preserving copyrights. “This is an Internet-scale solution to an Internet-scale problem,” Bide said. ACAP is extensible, flexible and able to scale to both current and future online publishing business models.
ACAP tries to facilitate copyright violation prevention as opposed to post-violation enforcement. It goes far beyond robots.txt, but “is not anti-search engine or anti-search,” Bide said. The permissions ACAP would include directions to search engines on crawling, following, indexing, preserving, presenting and other – plus subsets of all those "usage purposes."
ACAP is an initiative of the World Association of Newspapers, the International Publishers Association and the European Publishers Council. Although ACAP originated in Europe, current ACAP members include The Associated Press, the American Publishers Association, Reuters and others in the United States.
Two things to note here: None of the “Big Three” search engines – Microsoft Live Search, Yahoo and Google – has agreed to implement ACAP for a wide range of reasons. Also, NAA is a supporter of ACAP.
The next steps for the organizations behind ACAP are to expand it, actively encourage publishers to implement ACAP on their Web sites (implementing it will not affect how search engines crawl your sites yet).
Could ACAP, if implemented by more major U.S. publishers and honored by the “Big Three” search engines, have prevented the
Tribune-Google-Bloomberg controversy from this past weekend? Maybe. It is also designed to perhaps solve the issues that may come up when an online publisher takes down an article but it continues to appear in search engines thanks to caching, which can be a liability issue. But, whether it really takes hold with publishers and major search engines remains to be seen.
Either way, ACAP is still quite controversial. Several digital media types are, perhaps rightfully, concerned that ACAP could really decrease traffic to Web sites from search engines. (ACAP contests this has not happened in European test markets, but since the Big Three are not participating, who’s really to say?)