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ACAP press release archive
News releaseACAP - Frequently Asked Questions?
The full ACAP FAQ is available on the ACAP website at:
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. 2) Why should I implement ACAP?
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). 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. 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. 7) Isn’t this simply an attempt by publishers to “lock up” their content?No – precisely the opposite is true. 8) What about robots.txt?ACAP will work smoothly with the existing robots.txt protocol. 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. 10) Isn’t this all about money?No: but no one would deny that it is partly about money. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 17) Will ACAP slow down sites or have any impact on performance?Implementing ACAP will not cause any technical 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. 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. 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. 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. 22) How does ACAP decide which Use Cases to develop?Use Cases can be submitted by any ACAP member. 23) What is the difference between ACAP and Creative Commons?There are some real similarities between ACAP and Creative Commons, and some differences.
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