Will publishers go ACAP in hand?

At the tail end of 2006 I reviewed MPS Technologies BookStore platform. It looked like a good opportunity for publishers to exert a little more control over their intellectual property online. Especially when facing the unrelenting ‘googlisation’ of their IP from Google Book Search (a project to digitise works unless the IP owner opts out) or initiatives such as the Open Content Alliance.

BookStore, as an e-commerce online book repository, had the potential to offset the effects of Google. Publishers could tweak and brand and analyse user demographics to the hearts content. Search engines could be better utilised on the publisher’s own terms.

All very nice for them, but to really work well it seemed apparent that BookStore would need to garner enough support from fellow publishers and adopt a common set of standards.

Since then, the people at MPS Technologies have been engaged in getting just that by collaborating with a number of organisations looking to develop a set of workable principles.

Enter the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) pilot. The year long ACAP scheme was an experiment designed to develop a new universal standard; “for the automated expression of permissions online” the control part in other words.

As a joint initiative developed by the European Publishers Council, the World Association of Newspapers and the International Publishers Association ACAP is nothing to be sniffed at.

Where BookStore came into it was they were the only participating publisher to focus solely on e-Books and as a part of Macmillan publishing that could mean a big boost for e-book usage from now on.

On a smaller scale, but just as poignant to the debate, is this story from the BBC which tells of ongoing row between Welsh writers and the National Library of Wales.

The library embarked on a £1m publicly-funded project to digitise modern Welsh writing. The writers want remunerating for what they see as the republishing of their work. The library has offered a compromise of allowing the writers to opt out of the scheme.

Sound familiar? Maybe ACAP is the way forward for IP creators as well as owners?