NEWS ANALYSIS: ITEM

			Put ACAP on It: Publishers Turn to DRM to Manage Web Search Engine Access
			John Blossom
			2 October 2006
SUMMARY:			In the wake of a Belgian court's slap against Google's use of copyrighted news European publishers are pondering ways to fight off search engines becoming content destinations in their own right. The World Association of Newspapers is pushing a new system called ACAP to further this fight by requiring search engines to respect their often convoluted licensing schemes automatically. Well, it's about time that they tried this - well, actually it's a couple of years late at least. And therein lies the problem with making ACAP really stick as a solution that will make a commercial difference to mainstream publishers.

European publishers are astir in the wake of the recent ruling by Belgian courts claiming that Google's single-sentence news summaries in search results were violating copyright laws - a ruling in which Google did not even provide a representative in court to explain its position, according to the Society for Computers and Law. Emboldened by this court decision a group of European trade organizations led by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN)  has announced a new initiative to manage search engine access to content from newspapers and other established publishers via a new system of entitlement controls.

The new content access entitlement system, dubbed ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), is scheduled to be announced officially this week at the Frankfurt Book Fair and to be available online for publishers' use by the end of 2006. A briefing paper from WAN on ACAP posted by Search Engine Watch states the "why" of ACAP succinctly: "What is required is a standardised way of describing the permissions which apply to a website or webpage so that it can be decoded by a dumb machine without the help of an expensive lawyer." In other words, these publishers no longer are willing to accept "opt-out" as a way to manage copyright issues: Web search engine spiders must learn how to interpret explicit content permissions and licensing controls.

As Rightscom has been engaged to manage the project and the development time frame is notable short, presumably ACAP is likely to resemble or incorporate elements of Rightscom's existing rights management products. Rightscom spearheads the Digital Data Exchange (DDEX) consortium that has been defining content identification and version controls for the entertainment industry for incorporation into digital rights management schemes. Rightscom's Rights Data Dictionary (RDD) uses the same ISO standards as Digital Object Identifiers to define the functions and retrieval rights that may be available for a given piece of content. So whatever technology gets implemented for ACAP is likely to be built atop existing efforts already familiar to many publishers and search engine providers.

The great news about ACAP is that publishers are finally taking the responsibility for managing search access to their Web-based content under their own wing. With a wide variety of licensing models managed by publishers and an explosion of search engines and other outlets through which to manage access to their online content, both traditional publishers and search engines are challenged to manage traditional licensing models in an online environment. At least, then, there is a step towards trying to provide a content definition framework that can combine definitions of crawling rights with user access rights without having to resort to one-on-one licensing battles.

But in a broader framework the strengths of a system such as ACAP must be weighed against realities that may not even be on the radar screens of many publishers seeking to control search engine access. Here are a few key points that publishers should consider before taking their content and putting ACAP on it:

• Put yourself in your users' shoes. While traditional commercial strategies may make sense from the publisher-on-out view of the content world, they don't tend to make a heck of a lot of sense to the average content user. Professional information managers in libraries have a hard enough time understanding the rat's nest of layered licensing deals wrapped into their subscription services: how are the users going to understand why an article on one search engine provides additional text while another one provides only a headline? Publishers are eager to get search engines to fork over reasonable payments for accessing their content, but if they create a substandard product in the eyes of the users in the process they may be losing valuable exposure that could lead to more substantial revenues from the users themselves.
• Mind the competition. Publishers fret - with some rightful concern - about search engines acting as competitors in aggregating both content and regular visitors perusing content. Well, that's the nature of the beast, alas: in The New Aggregation it's more important to be showing up in the contexts in which users want a publisher's content to appear than to try to force them into your own contexts. Punishing specific search engines in favor of other portals may sound like a sensible commercial strategy from a traditional licensing standpoint but at the end of the day it's the user that you want to reach. Unless your content is truly unique be ready for competitors to see the opportunities in servicing users where they want to be - and undoing your carefully laid portal-based commercial strategies rather quickly.
• Search engines aren't the only game in town. The  focus of publishers on search engines as the bogies against which to focus their commercial countermeasures is largely misplaced at this point in history. The search engine wars are over for the most part, and we know who's won - EU initiatives notwithstanding. In the meantime users are becoming more in control of their own aggregation via social bookmarking portals, weblogs, wikis and other user-generated media outlets. Search engines make for tempting targets but the broader question of how a world that defines its own aggregation services is becoming a far more important commercial issue than bashing a few easily identified choke points.

Two years ago the ACAP initiative would have been a brilliant stroke well-timed for growing content markets. As it stands today it appears in some ways to be an initiative calling upon infrastructure to try to turn back the clock on content licensing concepts that need to move beyond choke points to a user-enabled content distribution environment. We'll see how the details unfold and hope that ACAP represents a system that can enable a very broad array of publishers to move forward into a rapidly changing publishing environment. But it's likely that ACAP will evolve as an entitlement system more akin to a subscription database service than a highly distributed tool that readers and publishers amongst the masses will embrace rapidly. Hats off to ACAP - but don't hold your breath that it will solve the perceived woes of global publishers.

- John Blossom

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