ACAP Blog
“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The argument is often made that the internet has made copyright irrelevant and outdated.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
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