News Syndication Version of ACAP Ready for Launch and Management Handed Over to the IPTC

BERLIN, June 8, 2011 -

The latest version of ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), the
publisher-led project launched in 2007 to develop tools for the communication
of online copyright permissions information, was presented at IPTC's Business
Meets Technology Day in Berlin on 8 June 2011. Version 2.0 of ACAP can be
used for business-to-business content syndication, in particular in the
context of licensing newspaper stories and the exchange of video content by
news agencies.

With the publication of ACAP 2.0, responsibility for the management of
the specifications created by ACAP is transferred to the IPTC (International
Press and Telecommunications Council), a consortium of the world's major news
agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors that develops and
maintains technical standards for news exchange.

ACAP Project Director Mark Bide said: "We are delighted that the time has
now come to pass the ACAP reins to IPTC. It is the ideal organisation to be
taking long-term responsibility for maintaining and extending the ACAP
specifications. Over the past four years, we have helped to communicate the
need for the development of appropriate mechanisms for the management of
copyright online to an international audience of business, rights holders and
politicians. Copyright is the cornerstone of the creative economy. ACAP has
been cited in a number of government papers on IPR including, most recently,
in the European Commission's Strategy on IPR in which it calls for
appropriate tools on the net for the communication of IPR. We are very proud
to have shown the way in providing solutions to the online copyright problem
that threatens the future of creative businesses. There are a number of
important cross-media initiatives beginning in which ACAP, under the
management of IPTC, will undoubtedly play an important part."

IPTC Chairman Stéphane Guérillot said: "The future of the news industry
hinges also on its ability to defend intellectual property. This is why IPTC
supports initiatives to communicate and enforce usage rights and policies.
ACAP is a technical tool to this end, within the framework of national and
international intellectual property laws."

Newly-published ACAP 2.0 covers basic use cases from the news industry
and can be used by many parties. With additional funding from the Newspaper
Licensing Agency (NLA) and with technical support from the NLA, the
Associated Press in New York and from the IPTC, the project has spent the
past year developing usage policies in news syndication and also in business
applications of online content delivery. The first version of ACAP was
designed primarily to express usage policies for publicly available online
content in web pages in a formal and machine-readable way.

As an integral part of the development of ACAP 2.0, the ACAP technical
team has spent the past year evaluating the new version 2.0 of the Open
Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as a potential technical foundation for
expressing usage policies in news syndication in particular, but also more
generally in business applications of online content delivery. This
evaluation showed that extending ODRL 2.0 for news industry specific
requirements will meet the range of business cases for which ACAP 2.0 was
developed. An ACAP Profile for ODRL 2.0 has been defined, which identifies
those features of ODRL 2.0 that can most usefully be employed in news
syndication and defines additional vocabulary for expressing the usage
permissions and constraints that are particular to the news industry. Testing
has shown that ACAP 2.0 also enables a wide range of usage policies to be
expressed in news exchange formats such as IPTC's NewsML-G2.

IPTC Managing Director Michael Steidl added: "IPTC welcomes ACAP 2.0 the
ability to express usage rights and permissions in a clear, unambiguous,
machine-readable way is increasingly a vital business requirement for media
companies. We look forward to overseeing the future development of ACAP and
invite our members and other interested parties to work together to extend
the set of supported use cases."

About IPTC: The IPTC, based in London, UK, is a consortium of the world's
major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops
and maintains technical standards for improved news exchange that are used by
virtually every major news organisation in the world. Information on all IPTC
standards such as the family of G2-standards, SportsML, NewsML 1, NITF, the
Photo Metadata standards plus the NewsCodes vocabularies and in future ACAP,
together with a list of existing members and information on how to join, is
available at www.iptc.org

About ACAP: Founded, funded and led 2007-2011 by:

European Publishers Council (EPC) www.epceurope.org

World Association of Newspapers - IFRA (WAN-IFRA)

www.wan-ifra.org

International Publishers Association (IPA)

www.internationalpublishers.org

    Project Director: Mark Bide
    Technical Director: Francis Cave
    www.the-acap.org
    20 Garrick Street
    London WC2E 9BT
    United Kingdom
    phone: +44(20)3178-4922
    fax: +44(20)7664-7878
    email: office@iptc.org

    Media contact:
    Michael Steidl, IPTC Managing director
    Mobile phone: +43-676-937-70-34
    Email: office@iptc.org

    For further information, please contact:
    ACAP Project Director Mark Bide on Tel: +44(0)20-7620-4445
    IPTC Managing Director Michael Steidl on Tel: +43-676-937-70-34

.