Paul Walsh over at Segala draws my attention to a nice piece in today’s Guardian newspaper here in the UK. Paul and I spoke for a podcast towards the end of last year, which covers much of the same ground.

Incidentally, I spotted a piece in the Business section of yesterday’s Independent that seemed related. The piece is focussed on the bickering between Viacom and Google, but hidden amongst the legal petulance and scarily humungous damages being sought, there lurked mention of something called the “Automated Content Access Protocol.” Quoting from the article (which may or may not be ironic!);

“Bloggers and websites increasingly use newspaper articles to attract users, provoke debate and sell advertising on their sites. ‘This is a big issue,’ says Larry Kilman of the World Association of Newspapers. ‘If a company like Google is using content and selling advertisements around it, that is of concern to many newspapers and publishers.’ The association, with partners including the global news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), Macmillan Publishers and Independent News & Media (parent group of The Independent on Sunday), is working to create an international protocol to regulate online use of newspaper content.

The Automated Content Access Protocol (Acap) would let owners of published content communicate permission information automatically in a form recognised by internet search engines. This would allow legitimate online users to comply easily and quickly with copyright law. Lawyers say such an international standard would be immensely useful. But making it work requires absolute clarity about what is protected by copyright and how it can be enforced.”

…

“British law allows quoting of newspaper articles for criticism or review, but does not permit republication of entire articles. ‘There is an urban myth that you can quote 400 words for free,’ says Mr Toner, ‘but no law says that.’ Mr Forbes explains: ‘Where websites republish so that readers do not have to go to the original newspaper in order to read the whole article, that is infringement.’”

As Paul said in email over the weekend,

“isn’t this just duplicating the Creative Commons Licences”

Well, maybe. But it also appears to be asserting a different set of permissions, and for a very different (though not necessarily wrong) purpose. It would be interesting to see the extent to which some of Paul’s work around content labels could be leveraged to support this use case before ACAP run off and invent yet another solution…

Technorati Tags: ACAP, copyright, Segala, Talis