ACAP Blog
2010 – a critical moment for the copyright industries?
A reflection by Mark Bide, ACAP Project Director
The last few months of 2009 saw the debate about the future of the media in the internet age shifting into a discernibly higher gear. At least in part, this is because the reality of the global recession – and its impact on advertising revenues – has served to highlight the ongoing challenges that the newspaper sector is facing: not least the future of professional journalism. And the seriousness of the problem is now being recognized not only by publishers but also (perhaps rather late in the day) by regulators – a recent example being the US Federal Trade Commission’s examination of potential changes that might be made to regulation to provide assistance to the beleaguered US press. The recognition is beginning to dawn more widely – including in Brussels –that present trends, if they continue, will make the creation and dissemination of professional journalism an unsustainable activity, with far reaching consequences for society as a whole.
The solutions proposed by commentators range from a more-or-less complete dependency on citizen journalism to establishing the press as a “not for profit” sector, supported by voluntary donation. Indeed, both of these strands seem likely to form at least an element of the future of news creation and dissemination. However, few of those who have examined the situation dispassionately appear genuinely to believe that a “for-free” culture will enable us to sustain a plural and competitive media in the medium term – whether for news, education or entertainment.
Some sectors may be able to devise sustainable advertising-supported models, but these are unlikely to provide adequate revenue anything much beyond “life style businesses” which support their owner and perhaps a small staff. Even Huffington Post, often characterized as “the most successful news blog”, and substantially dependent both on citizen journalists and on news originally gathered by other organizations, is not believed to generate significant positive operating margins from its entirely advertising-supported model.
This has driven the newspapers, led prominently by News Corporation and Axel Springer, to a more public espousal of “pay” models, although (with a few notable exceptions) there seems now to be a hiatus while everyone waits for someone else to make the first move. At the same time, a number of publishers have also strongly hinted at an intention to withdraw all of their content from Google on the basis that there is an inadequate exchange of value between the search engines and the providers of news.
The reality of the relationship between search engines and news sites was eloquently exposed at the WAN/IFFRA Congress in Hyderabad at the beginning of December by Matt Kelly of Trinity Mirror. Speaking about his company’s revised approach to online publishing, ignoring the advice of Search Engine Optimization specialists and making their sites more accessible for people than for search engine crawlers, Kelly said.
The days of leading the newspaper industry by the hand, down the path of mythic riches, are coming to a rapid close.
As Gavin O’Reilly of Independent News and Media pointed out at the same event, traffic (particularly traffic driven by search engines) does not create revenue:
“…I can’t take clicks to my bank manager.”
However, if publishers are going to adopt paid-for content models, their need to regain control over the use and re-use of their content on the network becomes much more obvious than it has been in the decade or more in which they seemed happy to give their content away to everyone. Claims relating to the scope of “fair use” may become even more unconvincing when they relate to content held behind pay walls, but the opportunity to arbitrage access is starkly delineated where the choice is between paid-for and free.
We have seen exactly what happens on the internet when content owners create services which are advertising supported, but where they are unable effectively to control access to that content. The music industry, as so often the canary in the mine, has had the experience of launching advertising-supported music streaming sites, where other operators (claiming a legitimate role as “music search services”) have inserted themselves – and their advertising – between the original music site and the consumer – a model that feels very familiar and takes revenue from the content owner (where revenue is already very limited).
The media cannot continue to operate without a business model. And business models for content mean copyright. We have now seen quite clearly that nothing else works – and that an internet without copyright fails to provide a platform for the media.
There are those ready to give up on the internet and pin their hopes on mobile. iPhone apps appear to have potential – you can sell the app and sell the content. And mobile is predicted to be an explosive growth market. Here, at least, you can apparently ring fence access in ways which provide potentially profitable business models.
But this may prove to be illusory in anything other than the relatively short term. While Apple’s vision of the mobile market is indeed closed and proprietary, that vision is not shared by the company which is soon to become Apple’s biggest competitor in this market – Google. Phones running Google’s Android operating system – itself open source – are forecast to enjoy massive growth over the next few years. It seems likely, based on precedent, that the current model of protected content distribution will go the same way as proprietary content portals went with the spread of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s.
So, is there no solution? Most of those present at the FTC meeting in Washington clearly believed that government intervention – except perhaps in relaxing some cross-media ownership regulation – would be likely to do more harm than good. So all the trends seem to be inexorably in the direction of destruction. Those who believe that “all information wants to be free” characterize this as “creative destruction”, but are notably unwilling to make much effort to forecast the creative part of this equation (as opposed to the destructive, which they often describe with some relish). Vague promises of the “monetization of the link economy” make little sense in hard economic terms. Not something you can take to the bank manager.
This is the issue to which the ACAP project has spoken since its inception in 2006. New ways need to be found to manage copyright on the network, working with the grain of the technology rather than across it. Technology provides us with unimaginable potential power to manage copyright “out of sight” – where it ought to be. By allowing machines to take over the heavy lifting of rights management in the 21st Century, we can press ahead with doing what needs to be done – creating the content and the business models on which to compete with one another, rather than having to competing with our distributors (legitimate and less so). That is what copyright gives us the opportunity to do – to choose who can use our content and how, to choose the channels through which we will distribute, to choose business models and pricing strategies.
But this cannot be achieved without the development of a new infrastructure, a rights management infrastructure fit for the internet. If it is to be acceptable, this has to operate seamlessly, in ways that are invisible to the user – in much the same way as when you use your phone, the whirring technology is completely invisible. ACAP is creating a modest but essential element of that infrastructure – the language in which machines can speak to one another, a language of rights and permissions. During 2010, ACAP will move beyond the constraints of the Use Cases for which its first version was conceived (managing the activity of search robots) to much wider use cases, where the requirement to manage copyright goes well beyond arguments about the efficacy (or otherwise) of the “Robots Exclusion Protocol”.
If they are going to pay for content, consumers will be intolerant of transaction inefficiencies – we need a common commercial framework around our disparate and diverse content. This may be difficult to realize, but we must weaken the capability of intermediaries to take control over our content – and over our brands – in ways which enable them to dictate our business models and our pricing. This implies an infrastructure that is owned in common –not one which is owned by a company with commercial interests which are divergent from those of the media. Our focus needs to be on creating an infrastructure that is universal –not confined to specific media but an open standard available to everyone. This is a challenge which news shares with the rest of the media.
Unless and until we can make copyright work on the network, the future is bleak – not only for the media (and those who depend on copyright for their livelihoods, as authors, composers and performers) but also for consumers. A future internet without high quality high value content will be drab and uninteresting, a place of unreliable, unbranded and low attention information. On the other hand, an internet which is “copyright enabled” has the potential to be a vibrant and creative space, in which large quantities of new and exciting content is made available to consumers.
2010 is the year when we should turn that corner.
Posted: 18/01/2010 14:52:30 by
Heidi Lambert | with 0 comments
World's Press Asks Google To Respect Copyright
Reported by WAN -IFRA from Hyderabad
The newspaper industry's representative association made an impassioned
defense of copyright to Google's chief attorney on Thursday, calling for "a
more rigorous and unambiguous acceptance" of publishers' rights to decide
how their content is used.
"Being able to make a commercial return is essential to justify investment
in content – whether we are talking news or education or entertainment – and
that depends on having the mechanism to choose how that content is
distributed, used and paid for," said Gavin O'Reilly, President of the World
Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), in a debate at the
World Newspaper Congress with David Drummond, Senior Vice President and
Chief Legal Counsel of Google.
"That is why copyright was invented 300 years ago – and when you consider
the breadth, depth, richness and diversity of 21st century media, it has
been a stunning success – and that is why copyright remains as relevant
today."
But Mr O'Reilly added: "what is clear is that, collectively, we haven't made
copyright work properly on the web, and that is down to we content creators
who have, perhaps foolishly, failed to enforce our copyright."
Mr Drummond denied that Google violated copyright. "This is not a question
of Google not respecting copyright. This is a fundamental disagreement when
you're applying copyright rules on the web," he said, adding that the idea
that indexing sites was a violation "flies in the face of how the web has
been built and how it operates."
But Mr Drummond said Google was interested in working with the newspaper
industry, and announced that Google was launching a separate crawler for
Google News, so that publishers can give one set of instructions on how
their content should be treated in Google News, and a different set of
instructions for Google Search.
He pointed out that Google News offers publishers a billion clicks a month
and massive traffic, which he called "a source of promotion undreamed of
just a few years ago."
Mr O'Reilly said: "Unfortunately, the pat answer always seems to be, 'don't
complain – aren't I giving you traffic?' As if I could take traffic to my
bank manager. But shouldn't I have the right to determine – as a fair trade
for my own content – whether I want traffic or something else? Leaving aside
the thorny issue of dominant market position that Google enjoys, why should
I just be forced to accept Google's business model of site referral as the
only online model?"
"I want to say that I am not advocating charity here. We publishers don't
need hand outs or crumbs from Google's table. What we want is a more
rigorous and unambiguous acceptance on copyright, an acknowledgement of our
right to choose our own business model, a more transparent technical
mechanic, and perhaps, less of the rather tired, 'fair use' rhetoric."
He called for adoption of the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), a
new protocol back by WAN-IFRA and others in the industry that allows
publishers to describe how their online content can be used in a way that
the news aggregators' automated indexing crawlers can read.
"Some dismiss this, including Google – saying that the existing Robots
Exclusion Protocol does the job just fine. But, if you're listening to us,
it just doesn't do it for publishers, and we publishers need something more
than essentially a binary 'yes/no' for the management and commercial
exploitation of our valuable content."
"If Google are genuinely pro-copyright, then they must be pro-ACAP, or at
least pro its goals, as all ACAP seeks to do is to make copyright work on
the web, by creating an infrastructure that is universal – not
proprietorial, not owned by any one individual business, not confined to
specific media, not telling anyone what their business model should or
shouldn't be, but making it easier for them to choose. An open standard
available to everyone and at no cost to the user."
More on ACAP can be found at http://www.the-acap.org
Also participating in the debate were: Kees Spaan, President of the Dutch
Newspaper Publishers Association and Chairman of the Copyright Working Party
of the European Newspaper Publishers Association, and Dae-Whan Chang,
Chairman of Maeil Business Newspaper and TV in Korea.
The debate was the closing session at the World Newspaper Congress, World
Editors Forum and Info Services Expo, the global summit meetings of the
world's press, which drew more than 900 publishers, chief editors and other
senior executives to Hyderabad, India. Full coverage can be found on the
WAN-IFRA multiblog at http://www.wan-ifra.org/blogs/wanindia2009 , on the
Editors Weblog at http://www.editorsweblog.org , on the Shaping the Future
of the Newspaper blog at http://www.sfnblog.org , or on Twitter by using
hashtag #wanindia09.
Read Gavin O'Reilly's remarks at http://www.wan-press.org/article18338.html
Read David Drummond's remarks at http://www.wan-press.org/article18339.html
Posted: 04/12/2009 14:02:43 by
Tessa Thier | with 0 comments
Newspapers push to reclaim their online identities, By Giles Hewitt, AFP
HYDERABAD, India, Dec 3, 2009 (AFP) - Newspaper editors and owners
Meeting in India have urged their industry to seize back the online publishing initiative from search engine "parasites" living off their work.
Speaker after speaker at the ongoing three-day World Newspaper Congress in the southern city of Hyderabad has argued that the current crisis in the newspaper industry requires a drastic rethink of Internet strategies.
With print advertising revenues in freefall, the search for real income from digital editions has become something of a Holy Grail for newspaper houses worldwide.
"One thing is sure, unless we protect and commercially exploit our high value content, the journalistic standards so important to our readers and to society will no longer be financially viable," said Timothy Balding, Chief Executive of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).
But options are limited, with WAN-IFRA warning in its annual world Press trends update that "at no time in the foreseeable future" will digital advertising revenues replace those lost to print.
In a 182-billion-dollar press advertising industry, newspapers' Digital income amounted to less than six billion dollars last year and is forecast by consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers to grow to no more than 8.4 billion dollars by 2013.
For many editors and chief executives in Hyderabad, the villains in all of this are giant search engines such as Google which, they insist, are stealing their stories without sharing advertising revenue. "We are allowing our journalism -- billions of dollars worth of it every year -- to leak onto the Internet," said Les Hinton, the Chief Executive
Officer of Dow Jones Co., which publishes the Wall Street Journal."We are surrendering our hard-earned rights to the search engines and the out-and-out thieves of the digital age," he said.
Under fire from News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and some other owners, Google offered an olive branch of sorts Tuesday, announcing it would let publishers set a limit on the number of articles people can read for free through its search engine.
But many executives argue that Google and its policies are only part of the problem.
"We have called Google a digital vampire and a parasite... but the truth is that this industry is the principal architect of its greatest difficulty today," Hinton said. Seduced by an evangelical belief 10 years ago that websites supported by advertising were the future, they raced to make their content freely available online in the hope of a new revenue windfall that never materialised.
Users, the vast majority of them guided by search engines, viewed snatches of their content but did not linger, and advertisers soon realised that their budgets would be better spent elsewhere.
"Like an over-eager, middle-aged dad, desperate to look cool, we ended up dancing obediently to other people's tunes," Hinton said.
For Hinton, the solution is to defy conventional wisdom that "free is best" and charge for online content -- as the Wall Street Journal does -- on the grounds that brand recognition and credibility will attract paying
viewers and advertisers alike.
But for many newspapers, especially those in the highly competitive General news market, going it alone in bucking the free online access trend is more problematic. Some advocate attracting a smaller, more loyal readership – and therefore more advertisers -- to their free sites by prioritising content above the scramble for maximum search engine traffic.
"By simply seeking extra volume, we have devalued our content in the eyes of our users. We need to re-establish our brands," said Matt Kelly, associate editor of the British tabloid, the Daily Mirror.
"We need to build sites that perform well for humans, not search
engines," Kelly said.
Posted: 04/12/2009 13:50:04 by
Tessa Thier | with 0 comments
“How will journalism survive the Internet?
Media business models – almost without exception – are as dependent on copyright today as they always have been. Copyright provides the incentive to create – and then to distribute as widely as possible – an incredibly diverse world of content. Making a return from investment in content – whether we are talking news or education or entertainment – depends on having the mechanism to choose how that content is distributed, used, and paid for. That is what copyright was invented for 300 years ago, and that is what copyright remains good for today.
No one would seriously deny that the internet has catalyzed the need for fundamental change in the media. The democratization of the mechanisms for the creation – and rather more critically the distribution – of content provide unprecedented opportunities for new entrants. But some things – including high quality, in depth news – are expensive to make. The need for printing presses and trucks may be reducing – but the people who write and shape the news still expect to be paid. And the investment in technology infrastructure is far from trivial.
An internet without the ever-growing richness and diversity of content we have come to expect will be a drab place indeed. But if we want that content, we need to find online business models for the media that provide an adequate return. Yes, we will still have content created by people who earn their living in another way and who are perhaps content to forego the material rewards of popularity; yes, we may have content paid for by Governments, like the BBC in the UK; yes, perhaps we will even see a return to content subsidized by wealthy individuals.
But absent functional business models, those seeking, indeed needing to make a return on investment will ultimately have no choice but to take their content – or perhaps just their investment – elsewhere.
The argument is often made that the internet has made copyright irrelevant and outdated. I would argue completely the opposite – rather, it has highlighted the importance of copyright in creating a vibrant and plural media sector. However, it is certainly true that up until now we haven’t made copyright work very well on the internet. Rather it has tended to be ignored as an inconvenience, something to be sidestepped. The time has come for this to change, for us to make the effort to make copyright work with the grain of technology rather than against it.
We need to harness the huge potential that technology has to make copyright function online, by creating the technical tools to make copyright work at machine-to-machine level. ACAP – Automated Content Access Protocol – seeks to provide a modest (if essential) part of that infrastructure: the language which machines can speak to one another. Our focus is on creating an infrastructure that is universal – not owned by individual businesses, not confined to specific media, not telling anyone what their business model should be, but an open standard available to everyone.
It is through the restoration of respect for and the effective operation of copyright on the network that journalism – and countless other forms of creativity and investment will find new ways of working, new audiences and a new lease of life for the future. And that is what ACAP is about.
Presentation delivered by Mark Bide at the FTC Conference in Washington
Posted: 03/12/2009 10:07:36 by
Tessa Thier | with 0 comments
ACAP and AP: a common and collaborative approach to managing copyright online
It has been reported that the Associated Press is to create a news registry that will tag, protect, and make online news content easier to use.
In the AP news release, Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP board of directors says: “The AP news registry will allow our industry to protect its content online, and will assure that we can continue to provide original, independent and authoritative journalism at a time when the world needs it more than ever.”
This is entirely in line with the objectives of ACAP which
has, of course, been driven from the outset by the news sector but has been working for the good of all content providers who wish to put their content online.
Both ACAP and the AP News Registry have functionality to express permission semantics for individual pieces of news content online. AP and ACAP are committed to a standards-driven agenda, and to ensuring that the News Registry and ACAP work effectively together.
“AP hosted the launch event for ACAP and has been a supporter of ACAP since its inception”, said Sri Kasi, General Counsel of AP. “ACAP was conceived as a solution for a part of the jigsaw puzzle of managing rights online”, he added, “AP’s news registry addresses other parts of that jigsaw and working with ACAP we will create a suite of tools which will help content owners manage their rights more effectively”.
ACAP’s mission is the standardisation of permission semantics – to ensure that permission expressions can be interpreted consistently in all machine-to-machine transactions; ACAP’s initial implementation is focused on search permissions and ACAP is working on other use cases which expand the scope of ACAP’s capabilities. ACAP’s interest is in enabling the widest possible interoperability, using the most appropriate technology, so that content owners can implement the policies of their choice.
AP’s permissions requirements which go beyond the existing ACAP semantics will form the basis of new ACAP use cases and we are working together on coordinating this within our two complementary projects.
AP news release: www.ap.org/pages/about/pressreleases/pr_072309a.html
Posted: 03/08/2009 10:45:43 by
Tessa Thier | with 0 comments