Frequently Asked Questions
1) What is ACAP?
ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) was developed during a year-long project between 2006 and 2007 as an industry standard by the publishing industry, working with search engines and other technical and commercial partners. More >
2) Why should I implement ACAP?
* because I care about how my online content is used and reused – and I want my business partners to be able to understand my policies
* because we need a standard for expressing these policies in machine-readable form – and ACAP is set to become the universal standard for policy expression
More >
3) Which partners were involved in the pilot project?
The full list of participants is listed here >
4) Where is the driving force behind ACAP?
The primary drivers of ACAP are the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the European Publishers Council (EPC) and the International Publishers Association (IPA). More >
5) How important is ACAP to the publishing and search engine industry?
For the first time ever, the newspaper, magazine and book publishing and search engine industry have worked together on a joint standard. It is thanks to this collaboration that the necessary high-level resources, skills and knowledge have been available as well as the political will to see this project succeed. More >
6) What is the business case for a new ACAP-enabled partnership between publishers and search engines?
In the first instance, ACAP provides a framework that will allow any publisher, large or small, to express access and use policies in a language that search engines' robot "spiders" can be taught to understand. More >
7) Isn’t this simply an attempt by publishers to “lock up” their content?
No – precisely the opposite is true. More >
8) What about robots.txt?
ACAP will work smoothly with the existing robots.txt protocol. More >
9) Is ACAP restricted to text media?
No: ACAP is designed to be extensible to all types of content published online, including audio and video. More >
10) Isn’t this all about money?
No: but no one would deny that it is partly about money. More >
11) What's in all this for search engine users?
More content will be searchable: ACAP will give content owners the confidence to allow search engines to index their content under clear terms of use. More >
12) Isn’t ACAP focused entirely on publishers’ recent disagreements with Google?
No: ACAP is a long-term strategic project, not a search for a short-term tactical remedy. More >
13) Aren’t Google offering commercial deals to some publishers?
Yes: but Google is not the only search engine with which publishers have relationships – and search engines have to have relationships with a very large number of publishers. More >
14) Are the search engines involved?
Major search engines are involved in the project. Exalead, the world¹s fourth largest search engine has been a full participant in the project. More >
15) Can anyone join ACAP?
As a member: During the Pilot Project, ACAP has attracted a very wide range of organisations, who have signalled their support for the work of the Pilot by becoming members. More >
16) What do I need to do to use ACAP on my website?
ACAP may be already be used in a variety of different business contexts, but its main initial purpose is for communicating access and usage permissions to web crawlers (also known as 'spiders' or 'robots') - the automated processes employed by search engine operators and others to "crawl" the web and harvest content for use in their services.
There are two stages to using ACAP on your website for communicating permissions to web crawlers. They are: implementation and verification. More >
17) Will ACAP slow down sites or have any impact on performance?
Implementing ACAP will not cause any technical problems. More >
18) what are the next steps going forward?
Further development is underway to finesse ACAP V.1 and also to develop a new version of the conversion tool. More >
19) Who "owns" ACAP after it is implemented and who is responsible for maintenance and upgrades and making sure it works successfully?
ACAP is a non-proprietary language for communicating your access and use policies which has been developed thanks to the resources of the publishing industry. More >
20) What is ACAP's position regarding Sitemaps?
At the beginning of the project, some of the publisher participants suggested using the Sitemaps protocol as a possible syntax for ACAP, but were firmly told by the search engines that (from their point of view) Sitemaps was entirely inappropriate to the use which ACAP proposed for it. More >
21) Can ACAP be used to extend the scope of copyright, and in particular to frustrate exceptions to copyright?
ACAP enables publishers to make statements of their policy with respect to the content they own or control; in view of the lack of consistency in intellectual property law internationally, there may be times when a publisher's stated policies are not consistent with the law in a particular country. More >
22) How does ACAP decide which Use Cases to develop?
Use Cases can be submitted by any ACAP member. More >
23) What is the difference between ACAP and Creative Commons?
There are some real similarities between ACAP and Creative Commons, and some differences. More >
Full responses
1) What is ACAP?
ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) was developed during a year-long project between 2006 and 2007 as an industry standard by the publishing industry, working with search engines and other technical and commercial partners.
ACAP enables the providers of all types of content published on the World Wide Web to communicate permissions information (relating to access and use of that content) in a form that can be automatically recognized and interpreted, so that business partners can systematically comply with the publishers' policies. In the first instance, ACAP provides a framework that will allow any publisher, large or small, to express access and use policies in a language that search engines' crawlers (also known as robots or spiders) can be taught to understand. During the next phase of ACAP, the scope of ACAP is being extended to other business relationships and other media types.
2) Why should I implement ACAP?
* because I care about how my online content is used
* because ACAP is set to become a universal standard
* because I want to put out a strong message that I have the right to manage how my online content is used
* because I have no idea who or what is spidering my content or what they are doing with it
* because I want the confidence to invest in high-quality online content
* because I want the confidence to put my high-quality content online and make it widely available
* because I want to be able to develop new online business models
* because it is the best technical solution available for the protection of my online copyright
* because it has the endorsement of the European Commission
* because I want to work with the search engines
* because ACAP is simple, non-proprietary and free
Why wouldn’t you implement ACAP?
3) Which partners were involved in the pilot project?
Participants included:
* Agence France-Presse www.afp.com
>
* De Persgroep www.persgroep.be
>
* Impresa www.impresa.pt
>
* Independent News & Media Plc www.inmplc.com
>
* John Wiley & Sons www.wiley.com
>
* Macmillan / Holtzbrinck www.macmillan.com
>
* Media 24 www.media24.com
>
* Reed Elsevier www.reedelsevier.com
>
* Sanoma Corporation www.sanoma.fi/english
>
* British Library www.bl.uk
>
* Exalead www.exalead.com
>
4) Where is the driving force behind ACAP?
The primary drivers of ACAP are the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the European Publishers Council (EPC) and the International Publishers Association (IPA).
These three organisations have steered and financed the initial stages of the project. The European Publishers Council is a high level group of Chairmen and CEOs of European media corporations actively involved in multimedia markets spanning newspaper, magazine and online database publishers. Many EPC members also have significant interests in commercial television and radio. The World Association of Newspapers groups 72 national newspaper associations, individual newspaper executives in 100 nations, 13 news agencies, and nine regional press organizations, representing more than 18,000 publications in all international discussions on media issues, to defend both press freedom and the professional and business interests of the press. The International Publishers Association is a Non Governmental Organization with consultative relations with the United Nations. Its constituency is book and journal publishers worldwide, assembled into 78 publishers as sociations at national, regional and specialized level.
During 2008, decisions will taken as to the future governance of ACAP; whether it be set up as a new organization working in collaboration with other existing standards organizations, or whether it be handed over to an existing standards organization.
5) How important is ACAP to the publishing and search engine industry?
For the first time ever, the newspaper, magazine and book publishing and search engine industry have worked together on a joint standard. It is thanks to this collaboration that the necessary high-level resources, skills and knowledge have been available as well as the political will to see this project succeed.
ACAP will enable new uses of works, and increase in their visibility, without any compromise to publishers’ commercial freedoms in general, though, publishers make their content available with the help of partners and third parties (distributors and retailers, for example) who are paid a fee or given a share of revenue in return for the services they provide. So there is no reason why, in the online world, they will not choose to do something similar as long as they can negotiate commercially acceptable terms that reflect the balance of value contributed by the publisher and the third party. Of course there is also no reason why they shouldn't choose NOT to make their content available in this way because they simply don't want to. It is an important principle that the publishers' right to decide what happens to their material is properly respected. However, to date, many aggregation websites have chosen to adopt a liberal attitude to copyright - "it's OK until someone tells us it isn't" - which means there is an enormous amount of infringing material being hosted by major companies. Leaving aside the question of whether or not this is reasonable, we have now found a better way for publishers, or any content providers, to make permissions for their content known to aggregators in a way they can easily understand.
6) What is the business case for a new ACAP-enabled partnership between publishers and search engines?
In the first instance, ACAP provides a framework that will allow any publisher, large or small, to express access and use policies in a language that search engines' robot "spiders" can be taught to understand. During future phases of ACAP, we anticipate that the scope will be extended to other business and usage relationships, other content value chains, and other media types.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 usiness models.
3. A large newspaper publisher that currently keeps its content offline might choose to launch an online archive of its historic material. It might be that the organization decides not to allow the archive to be spidered indiscriminately. But the organization might be willing to make it available for spidering in partnership with one or more search engines as long as there is agreement about what can be spidered, what can be made available in search results and what can be kept in the search engine's databases. Such conditions can be managed with ACAP in a way that they cannot be managed until today. Because this would be a paid-for service, it would enable various partnership opportunities, potentially different ones with different search engines.
4. ACAP will make possible more sophisticated ways of collaborating in the sharing of revenues – not only advertising revenues, but (for example) revenues from search which result in content sales; there are many proposed “micropayment”, “long tail” and “micro-licensing” models for content commerce on the network that are only economically feasible with the development of much more sophisticated communication within the value chain. Search engines are well placed not only to direct users to content, but to facilitate further uses of that content.
5. ACAP will provide a basis for the greater sharing of structured metadata, enabling for example the development of much more intelligent image search.
6. ACAP will create opportunities for the development of collaborative new premium products – for example, structured aggregations which can provide unified and sophisticated presentation of content drawn from a number of different sources.
7. Once ACAP can handle more sophisticated permissions we could also look at rights to republish certain material on other sites, or functionality which would allow this to be brokered by a third party like a search engine.
8. With automated rights clearance information, search engine crawler technology can be used as a content and licensing scout for content reusers, retrieving content that can conveniently and legitimately be licensed and reused. Currently, this requires extensive human intervention in many publishing houses, not to mention among music and film clip re-mixers.
9. By implementing ACAP, a publisher will be exposing its business model in finer detail than has hitherto been the case. From a search engine perspective, this should present opportunities. Certain patterns of permissions and prohibitions may suggest new ways in which the search engine can intermediate more effectively between publisher and end-user. For example, if a publisher is routinely setting time-limits on permissions, this suggests immediately that the publisher is shifting content between public and private areas for business-related reasons, perhaps to create a paid-for archive, a piece of knowledge that a savvy search engine should be able to exploit.
By definition, this list is intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. Once there is greater granularity in the system, the question becomes one of extending ACAP's specification to allow all these scenarios – and then the only limitation is the imagination of publishers and search engines to devise new collaborative business opportunities.
Is there any downside? Well, of course, just as they can today in the terms and conditions they put in “plain English” on their web sites, publishers can choose to express in ACAP access and usage constraints with which a search engine may not agree. But ACAP is not a technical protection measure – it does not prevent a search engine from doing anything that it does today in terms of fair use and other exceptions to copyright.
A more sophisticated capability for the expression of permissions is essential for the future management of content on the network – and ACAP has the broad support essential to making it work.
7) Isn’t this simply an attempt by publishers to “lock up” their content?
No – precisely the opposite is true.
Every publisher who implements ACAP will have the confidence to make content available to search engines much more widely than is currently the case.
8) What about robots.txt?
ACAP will work smoothly with the existing robots.txt protocol.
We recognise that robots.txt is a well established method for communication between content owners and crawler operators. However, robots.txt is not sophisticated enough for today's content and publishing models.Robots.txt, in its current form as implemented by most search engine operators, provides only a simple choice between allowing and disallowing access. These simple choices are inconsistently interpreted. A number of proprietary extensions have been implemented by several of the major search engines, but not all search engines recognise all or even any of these extensions. ACAP provides a standard mechanism for expressing conditional access which is what is now required. ACAP used Robots.Txt on the insistence of the search engines. A draft xml format is also under preparation.
9) Is ACAP restricted to text media?
No: ACAP is designed to be extensible to all types of content published online, including audio and video.
The next phase of the project will work on extending ACAP for other business models and media.
10) Isn’t this all about money?
No: but no one would deny that it is partly about money.
Publishers are not ashamed about making money out of publishing – that is their business. They make substantial investments in the creation and distribution of content, and believe that they should be able to make a fair return on those investments. Business models are changing, and publishers need a protocol to express permissions of access and use that is flexible and extensible as new business models arise. ACAP will be entirely agnostic with respect to business models, but will ensure that revenues can be distributed appropriately. ACAP presents a win win for the whole online publishing community with the promise of more high quality content and more innovation and investment in the online publishing sector.
11) What's in all this for search engine users?
More content will be searchable: ACAP will give content owners the confidence to allow search engines to index their content under clear terms of use.
Publishers are in the business of providing content to users; on the internet, search engines have proved to be an invaluable intermediary in the process. Other innovative models of intermediation are also appearing. The development of standards for expressing online access and use permissions will enable the development of an orderly information value chain which will provide users with access to the largest possible aggregations of authoritative content.
12) Isn’t ACAP focused entirely on publishers’ recent disagreements with Google?
No: ACAP is a long-term strategic project, not a search for a short-term tactical remedy.
The various court cases that have arisen between publishers and Google are a symptom of the problem that ACAP seeks to solve, not the problem itself. Just like Google, publishers would like to find solutions outside the courtroom. This is ACAP’s objective. The relationship between publishers and aggregators should not be adversarial but co-operative – for the benefit of their common customers.
13) Aren’t Google offering commercial deals to some publishers?
Yes: but Google is not the only search engine with which publishers have relationships – and search engines have to have relationships with a very large number of publishers.
Business relationships on the internet should not simply be about deals done between very large corporations. It will not be possible to manage the very large number of business relationships in the absence of much greater automation. ACAP aims to enable the majority of smaller publishers, smaller search engines and other innovative intermediaries to enter the growing market for online content with confidence.
14) Are the search engines involved?
Major search engines are involved in the project. Exalead, the world¹s fourth largest search engine has been a full participant in the project.
Any lack of public endorsement by the major search engines has not meant a lack of involvement ¬ indeed, quite the opposite, and our open and collaborative approach has allowed everyone, members or otherwise, to see what we have been doing and contribute if they want. Which means that from a practical point of view, ACAP has been the huge beneficiary of input, technical know-how and quiet wisdom of all of the major search engines,albeit in an “informal” way. A large number of representatives from Yahoo, Microsoft and Google attended the New York launch. We consider them as friends and collaborators and look forward to working more closely in the future. Once ACAP achieves a critical mass, we are confident that the search engines will come on board.
15) Can anyone join ACAP?
As a member: During the Pilot Project, ACAP has attracted a very wide range of organisations, who have signalled their support for the work of the Pilot by becoming members.
We have welcomed all types of organisation into membership of ACAP, and this will continue to be the case in future. You can find out how to become a member here >
16) What do I need to do to use ACAP on my website?
ACAP may be already be used in a variety of different business contexts, but its main initial purpose is for communicating access and usage permissions to web crawlers (also known as 'spiders' or 'robots') - the automated processes employed by search engine operators and others to "crawl" the web and harvest content for use in their services.
There are two stages to using ACAP on your website for communicating permissions to web crawlers. They are: implementation and verification.
1. Implementation
Implementing ACAP involves making some important changes to your website. These are of two kinds:
* changes to your 'robots.txt' file
* changes to content resources
The simplest way of communicating permissions information to web crawlers is through a 'robots.txt' file placed on your web server. If you already have a 'robots.txt' file, this will need to be modified to contain ACAP permissions in addition to the information that it already contains (remember that not all web crawlers will be able to interpret ACAP permissions, for a while at least, so you should retain the existing content of your 'robots.txt' file).
To save time and effort in modifying existing 'robots.txt' files, a tool for converting them to include the corresponding ACAP permissions is available here: >.
However, to gain the full benefit of using ACAP, you will need to make further modifications to ensure that the permissions say exactly what you need them to say. How to modify your 'robots.txt' file is explained in the ACAP Technical Framework documentation, which you will find here: >.
Another way of communicating permissions information to web crawlers is by embedding permissions information directly in the content resources themselves. ACAP permissions can be embedded in almost any kind of web resource, and how to do so is explained in the ACAP Technical Framework documentation, which you will find here: >.
Once you have implemented ACAP on your website, please add the "ACAP enabled" logo to your home page and other pages on your site. Go to: Add an “ACAP-enabled” logo: > to find out how to add the logo to your website.
2. Verification
Once you have implemented ACAP on your website, you will probably wish to verify the quality of your implementation. We expect there to be a number of ACAP verification services that can tell you whether your implementation conforms to the ACAP Technical Framework or not, and details will shortly be available on the ACAP website. Once your ACAP implementation has been verified, you will be entitled to add the "ACAP compliant" logo to your website.
17) Will ACAP slow down sites or have any impact on performance?
Implementing ACAP will not cause any technical problems.
The Times Online implemented ACAP on 28 November and has not reported any problems.
18) what are the next steps going forward?
Further development is underway to finesse ACAP V.1 and also to develop a new version of the conversion tool.
Any upgrades will be designed that can replace the existing protocol very simply. New use cases are also underway.
19) Who "owns" ACAP after it is implemented and who is responsible for maintenance and upgrades and making sure it works successfully?
ACAP is a non-proprietary language for communicating your access and use policies which has been developed thanks to the resources of the publishing industry.
In terms of maintenance, at some point during the next year, it will be decided whether ACAP will be set up as an independent organisation working with other standards organisations or whether its work will be handed over to an existing standards organisation. In either case, ACAP will continue to be managed and maintained.
20) What is ACAP's position regarding Sitemaps?
At the beginning of the project, some of the publisher participants suggested using the Sitemaps protocol as a possible syntax for ACAP, but were firmly told by the search engines that (from their point of view) Sitemaps was entirely inappropriate to the use which ACAP proposed for it.
They told us that, in order for them to be able to read and implement access and use permissions, the only mechanism they would be able to recognise was an extension to the robots exclusion protocol. If the search engines would prefer that we express the same permissions using Sitemaps, and would like to work with us to find the best way of doing this, we would be only too pleased. Sitemaps is an XML-based syntax which would be very much easier for us to work with, in comparison with the rather primitive structures of robot.txt. We are not wedded to any single method for the communication of permissions, and already have a draft XML format for ACAP expressions.
21) Can ACAP be used to extend the scope of copyright, and in particular to frustrate exceptions to copyright?
ACAP enables publishers to make statements of their policy with respect to the content they own or control; in view of the lack of consistency in intellectual property law internationally, there may be times when a publisher's stated policies are not consistent with the law in a particular country.
This is as true of an ACAP statement of policy as it is about the "terms and conditions" of use which almost all publishers include somewhere on their websites. ACAP is about communication of policies, not enforcement. If a user (whether that user is an individual or an organisation) is confident that their use falls within an exception within the relevant jurisdiction, they are as free to make that choice in an ACAP-enabled world as in one where ACAP does not exist. There is a difference, though: in a fully ACAP-enabled world, they cannot claim that it is impossible for them to know what a particular publisher's policy is with respect to the content they make available.
22) How does ACAP decide which Use Cases to develop?
Use Cases can be submitted by any ACAP member. Assuming that there is sufficient interest in the Use Case from a group of members, we will then work with a group of members to take these Use Cases to pilot implementation. Priorities are determined in part by the availability of internal resources, and in part by the enthusiasm of the appropriate group of technical personnel from among our members to work on the specific tasks involved. ACAP itself has no agenda on which specific business relationships require better policy communication or which particular sets of policies (permissions) need to be communicated in the context of those business relationships. Our stance is entirely business neutral. We see our role as enabling not prescriptive.
23) What is the difference between ACAP and Creative Commons?
There are some real similarities between ACAP and Creative Commons, and some differences.
The main similarity is that both of us are involved in the business of expressing rights holder policies with respect to their content, not enforcing those policies. So, a rights holder publishing under a Creative Commons licence is saying to a user: “I am happy to give you permission to use my content in these ways, but not in these other ways, subject to the following conditions”; and an ACAP expression of policies with respect to search engine access and use (which is where ACAP’s v1.0 is focused) is saying something similar to a search engine operator about the content to which is applies. The uses that a search engine makes of content are different from those made by an individual, but the principle is the same.
There are some differences, however. CC is primarily aimed at giving permission to end users, while ACAP is focused primarily on business-to-business relationships. The simple CC iconographic representation of permissions is backed up by a legal licence; ACAP rather depends on the fundamental right of the copyright owner to determine what use(s) can be made of their content, and on a well-ordered market place of relationships between businesses. CC is intended to be read and understood by people, ACAP by machines. ACAP is unashamedly about commercial content exploitation; CC is more about non-commercial uses.
So, ACAP and Creative Commons exist to tackle rather different sets of requirements. There has, however, been productive and useful dialogue between ACAP and Creative Commons which may yet develop further, since we clearly have some items of common agenda.