ACAP Blog

Google quote misleading

 Our Google contact, Josh Cohen, has been recently quoted by Mark Sweney in the Guardian as saying:

"We continue to speak to people at WAN [World Association of Newspapers] about Acap. Acap only addresses the small minority of content owners and [it has] major technical issues. We can't accept it in its current form. There are a number of challenges with Acap."

This statement is, I'm afraid, misleading.

  • Google hasn't spoken to anyone at WAN or ACAP about ACAP since September 2008 - a gap of around 6 months now. We remain entirely open to talking to Cohen, or indeed anyone else at Google, but that is only useful in the context of a proper dialogue.
  • The idea that "Acap only addresses the small minority of content owners" is perhaps a useful mantra but it means nothing. This is like saying that the Robots Exclusion Protocol only addresses the minority of content owners, or that Creative Commons only addresses the minority of content owners. Both are true, but this tells us nothing. More than 800 sites including a growing number of very substantial content owners are now expressing their support for ACAP, and Google cannot continue to ignore this in perpetuity (however much Cohen continues to suggest that this is an insignificant minority).
  • This is not the first time that Google has suggested that there are "major technical issues" with ACAP. We are happy to repeat the invitation that we have made to Google repeatedly on this subject - we have no commitment to a specific technical implementation, and will be happy to work with Google to resolve any outstanding technical issues. Google was involved in the ACAP's Technical Working Group from the outset, and provided invaluable technical input which strongly influenced the technical direction of ACAP specifically to simplify its implementation by search engines. We will be happy to continue this work with them, to resolve any technical issues, major or minor but remain slightly confused as to how a technical solution largely designed around their requirements in the first place could now have such, unspecified, "major issues".

Of course, there are "challenges" with ACAP - but these can be resolved by a determined effort to work collaboratively with that end in mind. We would welcome a resumption of substantive discussion with Google.

Mark Bide
ACAP Project Director
 

Posted: 24/03/2009 11:08:29 by Tessa Thier | with 0 comments

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Gatehouse Media/New York Times settlement

Many of you will probably have taken note of  a story earlier this week about the settlement http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/GHS/530420019x0x267768/3033b0e7-7aff-4dc8-83e6-204ce95044f4/267768.pdf between Gatehouse Media and the New York Times Co. A description http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/26/AR2009012601590.html of the dispute and its settlement written by David Kaplan can be found at the Washington Post. In explaining why Gatehouse Media had taken its  competitor to court, Kaplan says:

 

“But more than the use of its content, the publisher was frustrated that the links do an end-run around the ads on its homepage. And that's something that could become a major issue for other small newspapers facing increased competition from hyperlocal news sites and dwindling ad spending”
 
The current global financial situation is inevitably focusing all online publishers much more clearly on their online revenue potential. Commentators like Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine http://www.buzzmachine.com/  can argue all they like that publishers should embrace “the link economy” and welcome all uses and reuses of their content online – but publishers have yet to find any way of making “the link economy” pay the bills. And no amount of theorising has yet resolved this basic conundrum as Eric Schmidt of Google made clear in a recent interview http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/07/technology/lashinsky_google.fortune/index.htm .
 
The settlement that has been reached between Gatehouse Media and NYT does not touch on any of the core arguments about whether the “scraping” techniques used to extract content from Gatehouse Media sites is  or is not “fair use”, and it can certainly be argued that the cost of taking a case to court will continue to be a major deterrent to anyone resolving this question. We have seen others step away from the same dispute recently. But the settlement hinges on the implementation (by both parties, presumably) of “commercially reasonably technological solutions” (without specifying what these might be).
 
This settlement goes to the heart of the ACAP argument – that owners of copyright content must be free to decide how their content is used online, in exactly the same way as they are able to make those decisions offline. But it is only realistic to be able to make decisions of this kind if you are properly able to communicate them within the information supply chain; and on the network that means communicating them at machine-to-machine level – nothing else is scalable (or indeed “commercially reasonable”).
 
ACAP provides a solution that is both scalable and sufficiently flexible to allow online publishers to make real informed choices about the exploitation of their content by third parties.  ACAP is a solution for the time has definitely come.
 

Posted: 03/02/2009 13:02:24 by Tessa Thier | with 0 comments

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ACAP: facilitating dialogue

I have been travelling widely in the last month, taking the ACAP message to various meetings and events in Europe and the United States. Aside from leaving me temporarily rather deaf (presumably too many ascents and descents in too short a time), I have been left with what I hope will prove to be some rather more enduring legacies.

One of these was the result of a discussion following my presentation at the Online News Association (ONA) conference in Washington DC on September 12.  This is a very busy and lively event, and I was invited to present ACAP in one of three parallel tracks; I got an audience of something over 100 people for a one hour session.

My presentation of ACAP, as is often the case, engendered quite lively debate on a number of issues. One thread was the concern (expressed by Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com) that ACAP poses a threat to journalism since it would involve “locking away” news, when the greatest value in what Jeff calls the “link economy” lies in making content as widely available as possible; he holds that it is therefore incumbent on news providers to find some way of monetising that ubiquity.  My response to this was the same as always: nobody (least of all me) denies that this provides the basis for a potential business model (and like any other business model is one which is fully supportable within the ACAP framework). However, it is simply not the case that, for the future, there is only one conceivable business model for content on the web; and it is (and should remain) open to publishers to choose which business model they wish to adopt for the publication of their content. ACAP’s role is to enable innovation and diversity in business models, and certainly does not suggest that publishers should hide their content from search. 

However, it was another thread of the discussion that in retrospect has really caught my attention. This was about the potential of some elements of the ACAP specification to be used maliciously for “cloaking” – for example, leading a search engine inadvertently to point users at malware, which they might download by clicking on an apparently legitimate search result for something entirely innocent.

We accept that there is real possible hazard here; ACAP has always acknowledged this. However, I think the problem is substantially overstated. Because in the end, it can easily be overcome by the establishment of a trusted relationship between crawler and crawled.   It seems to me that, rather than worrying about the risks of cloaking, we should rather be concerned about seeking solutions that resolve this general problem of establishing trustworthiness.

I found this view being confirmed only three days later in an interview which Tim Berners Lee gave to the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7613201.stm). Although he was talking about the need for creating trust in information on the web in a slightly different context – primarily seeking to answer the question: how you distinguish between good and bad science on the web – the challenge is by no means dissimilar.  The network provides a platform for both reliable and unreliable providers of information in all fields of human endeavour. How do we distinguish between them? From an ACAP point of view, how can we find ways that are acceptable and reliable for indicating (at a machine-to-machine level) that a website is not going to indulge in maliciously inspired cloaking?

Don’t expect to find an instant answer to that question here. Although I have for a long time been working on a model that identifies authority (a concept similar but not identical to brand) as an enduring source of added value in the information value chain, a clear mechanism for the establishment of monetisable authority on the internet continues to prove elusive.  Nevertheless, it seems to me that we should indeed be focusing more on finding ways of establishing trustworthiness in web content than in explaining why it cannot be done.

One significant effect of ACAP has been to open up a number of crucial debates between different communities –between the different sectors of the content industries, as well as between the content industries and the search community.  We are all learning a lot – and we are very pleased that ACAP has facilitated that process.

 Mark Bide, ACAP Project Director

Posted: 08/10/2008 09:23:46 by Tessa Thier | with 0 comments

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ACAP Implementation

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

Posted: 07/04/2008 14:41:29 by Heidi Lambert | with 0 comments

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Business case for ACAP between publishers and search engines

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

Posted: 26/03/2008 11:59:56 by Heidi Lambert | with 0 comments

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