The desertion of advertising dollars from the ailing print media industry has left publishers searching for more of the one thing that the Internet seems intent on denying them: paying customers. Print publications in the US and Europe are scrambling to find ways to charge somebody—readers, link aggregators, blogs, competitors—for deriving any sort of benefit from the reporting they're doing.

A group of European publishers has recently released a declaration of principles, the "Hamburg Declaration," that amounts to a long-winded rant against the Internet for stealing their news. They want the government to step in and fix the situation by force of law.

Most of the statements in the relatively short declaration, which will surely take its place among thousands of other European declarations on intellectual property and other matters that have come out over the past few years, hinge on the idea that "universal access to news" does not equal "free." In this respect, the publishers want to maintain the democratic ideal of a "fourth estate" that provides news to an informed citizenry, while simultaneously restricting access to that news to those who can pay for it directly.

What sets this declaration apart from the other Hamburg declarations out there, or from the various Geneva declarations or Berlin declarations, is that this one is intended to give the publishers' favorite solution to the news-stealing problem, the Automated Content Access Protocol, the force of law.

ACAP is a metadata standard that's a bit like robots.txt—but on illegal steroids that cause anger management issues and can precipitate bouts of violence and heart problems. The standard aims to dictate how search engines and other aggregators handle a publisher's content by defining usage rights that third parties are supposed to respect (more on this below). But because search engines have rejected ACAP in favor of their own news metadata solutions, the publishers are asking the EU to step in and mandate it outright:

"We need search engines to recognize ACAP as a step towards acknowledging that content providers have the right to decide what happens to their content and on what terms," said the Chairman of ACAP, Gavin O'Reilly. "The European Commission and other legislators call on our industry constantly to come up with solutions—here we have one and we call upon the regulators to back it up".

Google to ACAP: let's try Rich Snippets instead

In a takedown of ACAP last year, our own Ryan Paul described the faults of the publisher-backed system as follows:

The problem, however, is that ACAP expands beyond the scope of indexing and also stipulates restrictions on the manner in which content is conveyed... ACAP can describe restrictions on the number of words that third parties are permitted to display in a text snippet, prohibit annotations like user ratings or tags, prohibit conversion to alternate formats like PDF, limit the use of typographical style and formatting changes, restrict translation, insist that the content can only be displayed in a frame that replicates the exact conditions of the original source, or impose a number of other equally bizarre requirements.

Implementation of ACAP is trivial for publishers, but it would put a real burden on indexing engines, which would have to accommodate a potentially huge range of rules and display formats.

So instead of ACAP, Google has put forth its own news metadata standards that are intended to serve the reader, and has invited others to suggest their own such standards. Google's "Rich Snippets," announced in May, include information like user ratings, content samples, and data that publishers would like to share with Google users.

More recently, the AP and Media Standards Trust have also announced a new metadata format, called Value Added News, which appears to live somewhere between Rich Snippets and ACAP on the reader-friendly vs. publisher-friendly scale, in that it contains rights information on the content as well as snippets of text that can be republished by aggregators.

But given that the AP would apparently prefer restrictions on bloggers' use of basic AP facts and reporting, and given the organization's track record with trying to charge money for quotes over a few words in length, a fair amount of skepticism towards VAN is warranted.

Twitter: sort of like the old AP wire, but with more hype

It does indeed seem likely that readers are going to have to pay more for some types of content, at least while advertising dollars continue to be scarce. But the billion dollar question for news organizations is, what type of content will readers pay for? I can't say what the answer to that is, but I know what the answer probably is not: short, bare-facts wire stories intended to break news about major happenings.

A case in point was the Pentagon's recent panic-inciting photo-op/flyover of the Statue of Liberty. Like most of the Internet, I heard about this first on Twitter, and the mainstream news orgs were left to "break" the story by getting the facts off of Twitter and blogs and then turning those facts into a news story—with or without the addition of some extra legwork.

Take a look at our summary of the 1918 "hot news" case that spawned the "misappropriation" doctrine that the AP recently cited in its efforts to police the Internet's use of its "scoops":

In 1918, the AP was involved in a case called International News Service v. Associated Press. Like current competitor All Headline, INS didn't actually copy AP's stories. Instead, they'd snatch AP's hot wartime scoops off the wire, have a hired hack rewrite the story in his own words, and put out their own version of the breaking news without having to bear all the overhead (not to mention the considerable risk) of sending trained reporters to a war zone.

I'm the last person who wants to add to the Twitter hype, but copying the news off the wire and doing a write-through sounds a whole lot like what the big news orgs do to Twitter when a pop star dies or military jets overfly NYC.

My point is that a lot of really big, hot news is now effectively free-as-in-speech, and this will make it very hard for publishers to justify charging for it, or for readers to justify paying for this type of ephemeral, "just the facts" news. So while the AP and Media Standards Trust are right to focus on "value add," unfortunately for them, "value" that readers will pay for increasingly does not include the bare facts of major events.