Automated Content Access Protocol

Automated Content Access Protocol ("ACAP") is a proposed method of providing machine-readable permissions information for content. This will allow automated processes (such as search-engine web crawling) to be compliant with publishers policies without the need for human interpretation of legal terms. ACAP will be developed by the publishing industry with technical partners (including search engines). It is intended to provide support for more sophisticated online publishing business models. ACAP will be a metadata standard, not a specific web publishing technology.

Current status

As of April 2007 ACAP has commenced a pilot project in which the participants and technical partners are specifying and agreeing various use cases for ACAP to address. A technical workshop, attended by the participants and invited experts, has been held in London to discuss the use cases and agree next steps. A number of project and public conferences and meetings are planned during the course of the pilot.

Previous milestones

Be February 2007 the pilot project was launched and participants announced.

By October 2006, ACAP had completed a feasibility stage and was formally announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair on 6th October 2006. A pilot program commenced in January 2007 involving a group of major publishers and media groups working alongside search engines and other technical partners.

ACAP and search engines

One of ACAP's initial goals is to provide better rules to search engine crawlers (or robots) when accessing websites. In this role it can be considered as an extension to the Robots Exclusion Standard (or "robots.txt") for communicating website access information to automated web crawlers.

It has been suggested that ACAP is unnecessary, since the robots.txt protocol already exists for the purpose of managing search engine access to websites. However, others support ACAP’s view that robots.txt, devised over 10 years ago and subsequently unmaintained, is no longer sufficient. ACAP argues that robots.txt was devised at a time when both search engines and online publishing were in their infancy and as a result is insufficiently nuanced to support today’s much more sophisticated business models of search and online publishing. ACAP aims to make it possible to express more complex permissions that the simple binary choice of “inclusion” or “exclusion”.

As an early priority, ACAP is intended to provide a practical and consensual solution to some of the rights-related issues which in some cases have lead to litigation between publishers and search engines.

Other applications of ACAP

While ACAP is initially most strongly associated with issues relating to the relationship between publishers and search engines, it is intended that ACAP’s scope will extend to other online content gathering and aggregation relationships. This is illustrated by the decision of the British Library to join the pilot project, with the aim of exploring the application of ACAP to the harvesting of the UK web domain for digital preservation. Other future applications are also envisaged and ACAP will be designed to be extensible to cover new functionality.

Comment and debate

The project has generated considerable online debate, in the search, content and intellectual property communities. If there is one linking theme to the commentary it is that keeping the specification simple will be critical to its successful implementation.

ACAP participants

Publishers confirmed as participating in the ACAP pilot project include (as at 16th February 2007)

• Agence France-Presse
• De Persgroep
• Impresa
• Independent News & Media Plc
• John Wiley & Sons
• Macmillan / Holtzbrinck
• Media 24
• Reed Elsevier
• Sanoma Corporation

External links

• Official website
• British Library website
• Article about ACAP and Google in The Guardian newspaper
• Yelvington article about ACAP
• Wildly Appropriate article about ACAP