ACAP and Escenic Content Engine
ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) is a proposed method of providing machine-readable permissions information for content, or electronic online DRM. As there has been some debate regarding ACAP, Escenic would like to state that Escenic Content Engine supports ACAP for customers wanting to implement it.
ACAP is an extension to the "robots.txt" format, used by search engines to determine which parts of a website should be indexed or "crawled". One example is "ACAP-allow-index: /news/2008/ time-limit=until-2008-12-31", requesting search engines not to index the specified content after December 31 2008.
At the time of writing, only one search engine, French Exalead, has joined ACAP. Google, Yahoo and MSN have not, as can be read in this article at Journalism.co.uk.
Implementing ACAP with Escenic Content Engine
Escenic customers wanting to use ACAP with Escenic Content Engine can do so without any limitations. As ACAP states on their website: "Implementing ACAP should take just 30 minutes at the most. It is an extremely simple process for any IT professional".
Using a "robots.txt" file with Escenic Content Engine has always been possible, and extending it with ACAP statements is straight-forward. More advanced functionality, such as automatic updates of "robots.txt" based on events, and integration with Escenic Content Studio is also possible, using the Escenic Content Engine open Java API.
Escenic customer The Times Online was the first publisher to implement ACAP, using Escenic Content Engine. This is their robots.txt file.
Further references
A search for "ACAP" should give several results with any search engine. Some of them might be:
- Wikipedia: Automated Content Access Protocol
- ACAP: Official website
- ACAP: Implementing ACAP
- The Telegraph: Acap: a shot in the foot for publishing
- iTWire: ACAP content protection protocol "doesn't work" says Google CEO
- Martin Belam, currybet.net: ACAP - flawed and broken from the start?
- ACAP answers its critics
Note (July 28 2009): This article was published March 25 2008. After that the ACAP organization by mistake published a document stating that Escenic had implemented support for ACAP. This is incorrect. While implementing ACAP is certainly possible using Escenic Content Engine, Escenic has never made any effort for supporting it, nor is Escenic in endorsing ACAP.
