Creating Standards for the Book Rights Registry: Using Existing Standards Part 1 – ACAP

There are several components that need to be involved in this standard, including:

• Uniquely identifying discrete content, including components (aka chunking) of existing content
• Associating available rights and usage of that content, and corresponding pricing
• Protocols for communicating that content and rights (the message) to the BRR
• Protocols for messaging acceptance status by the BRR
• Protocols for discovery of content by third parties
• Protocols/Messaging for requesting use of content by third parties from the BRR
• Reporting of usage and payments by third parties to the BRR, and by the BRR to content owners (publishers)

Several standards exist that may be usable for certain components of this data flow.  Here, I am going to investigate the use of ACAP.

ACAP has been suggested as a possible standard for representing available rights for content.  After studying the standard (see http://www.the-acap.org/Files/8d/8df1c295-0124-4e56-b3b5-777ba15e682f.pdf for a good overview), I believe that there are some things that can be learned and borrowed from the standard, but that it is not appropriate for use with the BRR.

ACAP has been designed to identify how third party “crawlers” can use content on a website.  Therefore, it has an entirely different set of use-cases than is required by a BRR standard.  For the BRR, we need to identify content which may or may not be published on a public website.  Because it will often not be so published, a standard for crawling web sites is not appropriate.

That leaves open the question of whether we can use the same methodology for identifying usage rights.  Again, ACAP is not designed for this purpose.  It has a much coarser descriptor of rights than is required.  For example, it defines that translation is allowed, but it does not indicate in which markets or which translations.  It also does not appear to address non-textual usage (i.e. a dramatic reading of content to be broadcast online).

So while there are things that we can learn from ACAP, it is not intended to be used in such a way as is required by the BRR.

For future analysis:  can we use the rights expression capabilities of ONIX (ONIX-PL), and if so, does it make sense to.