Launched in October last year and on schedule to be completed by the end of 2007, ACAP is designed to encourage owners of high quality content to make their work easily available online and also help avoid complex and costly legal disputes between content providers and search engines.
The conference to mark the pilot project’s halfway point showed:
 The pilot has already established that there are no insoluble technical challenges.
ACAP is building on existing technology including Robots Exclusion Protocol and is using established methods for defining standard permissions semantics.
Collaboration and support for the project has been overwhelming: the list of 28 organisations continues to grow and represents a worldwide interest in the project (partners are listed below).
Work is now underway to prepare ACAP for the post-pilot stage -- to hand over a long-term sustainable model to a pre-existing governance organisation or to set up its own ACAP governance organisation.
"ACAP has that air of ’rightness’ about it, a proposal and solution which seems to make sense to most people we talk to, whether they’re publishers, politicians, journalists and even search engines - ACAP just makes sense," said Gavin O’Reilly, President of the World Association of Newspapers.
“What we seek to do together is create the foundations for what is surely the highest aspiration that publishers, aggregators, search engines and politicians could have for the content industry - namely an increasingly healthy, profitable and vibrant sector which drives knowledge and diverse thinking throughout the internet and the world and which creates new opportunities for everyone," he said. "Openness is one of the greatest of ACAP’s many strengths, and I hope it will become one of its most enduring legacies.”
ACAP is developing a language that will allow publishers to state permissions information in a standardized format that can be read by the web "crawlers" that are used by search engine operators and other content aggregators to search and index on-line content. No such system currently exists to enable the search engine operator to systematically comply with such policies on how this content can be used.
With ACAP, a newspaper web site could, for example, allow all search engines to index its content, but only allow selected search engines -- those who have paid a royalty or have a commercial agreement -- to display articles, and, if they so choose, only for a limited time. It would also allow all images to be properly attributed, as they are in the newspaper.
ACAP’s final conference will be held on 29 November 2007 in London.
For more information, please contact Heidi Lambert on Tel: + 44 (0) 7932 141 291, Mark Bide, ACAP Project Manager, on Tel: +44 (0)7785 306267 or visit www.the-acap.org.
Speeches from the conference can be found here.
ACAP partner organisations involved in the pilot:
Agence France-Presse
De Persgroep
_ Impresa
_ Independent News & Media Plc
John Wiley & Sons
Macmillan / Holtzbrinck
Media 24
Reed Elsevier
Sanoma Corporation
British Library
ACAP members include:
Associated Press
Association of American Publishers
Australian Publishers Association
Copyright Agency Limited
Copyright Clearance Center
Copyright Licensing Agency
Dapper
De Nederlandse Dagbladpers
European Alliance of News Agencies
European Newspaper Publishers Association
European Publishers Council
Fairfax Business Media
Federation of European Publishers
International Association of STM Publishers
International Publishers Association
Mediargus
Motion Picture Association
News International
News Limited Australia
Newspaper Association of America
Newspaper Licensing Agency
Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI)
Ovid Technologies
PLUS Coalition
Publishers Licensing Society
Random House Group
Recording Industry Association of America
Reuters
Scholastic
Vlaamse Dagbladpers
World Association of Newspapers
The Paris-based WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, represents 18,000 newspapers; its membership includes 76 national newspaper associations, newspaper companies and individual newspaper executives in 102 countries, 12 news agencies and 10 regional and world-wide press groups.
Inquiries to: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications, WAN, 7 rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: lkilman@wan.asso.fr |
