Yesterday I gave a talk at the Annual Meeting of the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) whose job is to distribute money received from licensing organisations to publishers. It is a parallel organisation to the Authors Licensing and Collecting Agency (ALCS). Both organisations are excellent and vital. They are both facing challenges as we move into the digital world. It's not going to be easy. Will publishers be happy to see a third party doing deals with the digital content they control? The organisations were set up to ensure fair payment for the use of copyright material from photocopying etc. A collective licence was clearly the best way to deal with that. But is it the best way to deal with digital delivery of content which can be tracked much more readily? I definitely don't know the answer but I do know that working together through these organisations is a better way forward than every author and every publisher trying to set rules.

And today, on a similar theme, I am attending the first international conference of ACAP whose acronym hides the incomprehensible but important words 'Automatic content access protocol'. It sounds arcane but it is an essential development if copyright holders are to work successfully with the major search engine companies. I quote from the conference programme:

At its first major conference on 26 June in London, ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), is presenting its work so far in developing a standard by which the owners of content published on the World Wide Web can provide permissions information (relating to access and use of their content) in a form that can be recognised and interpreted by a search engine “spider”, so that the search engine operator is enabled systematically to comply with the permissions granted by the owner. ACAP will allow publishers, broadcasters and any other to express their individual access and use policies in a language that search engine’s robot “spiders” can be taught to understand.

It is not an easy road and some of the technical stuff is jaw-breakingly dull but ACAP has managed to bring together most parts of the media industry (newspapers, TV, radio, publishing) to work with search engines. The result, if we can get there, will be that search engines will be able to find relevant pieces of information and allow the content holder to control access and charge if desirable. That is beneficial to all and allows full copyright control.

As today's posting is a bit serious and acronymic I thought I'd end with this link. Many people have suggested that I suffer from ADD but I thought they meant attention deficiency disorder not this alternative translation.