The Bookseller.com

17th May 2008

Simon Juden

Simon Juden is chief executive of the Publishers Association.

Towards a digital agenda

25.04.08

Text of a speech delivered by Simon Juden at the Publishers Association AGM 2008

The Publishers Association covers a catholic constituency, whose members publish works ranging from learned scientific, technical and medical journals; through textbooks, at school, college and university level; professional and business information publishers, serving “the professions” and a range of other business constituencies; and the consumer trade in non-fiction, reference and fiction.

Each of those constituencies is in a different place economically and technologically, and the PA's work to date on digital matters has largely been in those silos, with particular pieces of work corresponding to particular parts of the overall publishing sector.

This talk is about defining a digital agenda for the PA as a whole. This will, in fact, necessitate taking a view not only across the PA's constituents but also the wider content industries as well. 

To set a context and give some motivation for this, I am going to start by outlining what the PA is for: what we do and some of how we do it. 

As the word “towards” indicates, I will not conclude with an agenda as such; indeed the agenda is not mine to define. Rather, the objective of this session is to outline the steps we are going to take towards the creation of a coherent cross-sectoral digital agenda with all relevant stakeholders.

One of the outputs of the strategic review I conducted on taking office was this mission statement, drawn up in consultation with our members, my staff and other stakeholders.

The PA's mission is to strengthen the trading environment for UK publishers, by providing a strong voice for the industry in Government, within society and with other stakeholders in the UK, in Europe and internationally; providing a forum for the exchange of non-competitive information between publishers; and providing support and guidance to the industry through technological and other changes.

Like any trade body, the Publishers Association was founded by the major players in the industry.  Its purpose may be summarised as the management of collective public affairs, business and regulatory agendas.  Those agendas play out nationally, globally, or (critically and increasingly) at EU level, and we manage complex, multi-layered engagements with governments, governmental, cross-governmental and non-governmental bodies and other interest groups and lobbies within and across groups of nation states.

Our members collectively represent something a little over £4bn turnover in a £5bn part of the UK economy. Together with magazines and newspapers, publishing is the largest media sector in the country, and our exports lead the world: the UK exports more publishing outputs than any other country. As the Prime Minister remarked at the London Book Fair last week, the copyright industries as a whole represent some 8% of the economy, and in economic terms publishing is second only to computer software in importance among them.

As well as modernising aspects of our operation, a programme we are in the middle of, our key areas of activity may be summarised as follows.

Intellectual Property, and in particular copyright, lies at the heart of the publishing industry and indeed our activity here at the PA. We are closely and deeply engaged domestically, in Europe and more widely on a broad range of issues relating to the development of copyright, both generally and with relation to the digital revolution so hotly anticipated in the consumer trade. 

It is impossible to summate that work in a few sentences; I would refer you to our annual report, which will be on our website shortly after this meeting concludes. Additionally, we do a lot of work particularly in the UK, China and India, but also across a number of territories, on enforcement and the prevention both of piracy and of leakage. Working on e-crime is an ever more significant part of that work.

Something that is very close to my own heart is the advocacy programme, which aims to explain the value of UK publishing in economic, cultural, scientific, educational and social terms, strongly communicating the role of and value added by publishers in a changing environment. The aims of this are to set a context within which policy decisions affecting the sector are taken, and to boost the general public's appreciation of one of the UK's great unsung success stories. This speaks inter alia to the diversity agenda, as a key part of persuading people from all parts of the community that they want to come and work with us in publishing houses.

While Intellectual Property and copyright lie at the heart of what we do, we are also engaged on a whole raft of other issues, ranging from taxation through to the environment, and covering a plethora of industry and other concerns. Some of these issues run across our whole constituency; many sit more naturally within one or more of the divisional groupings.  In all cases, our role is proactively to define policy positions in consultation with members, and consistently deliver on them in the public affairs arena and with other relevant stakeholders.

Our work on digital agendas is, again, broad and multi-faceted. It ranges from issues relating to copyright, like electronic document delivery by libraries, to those which are entirely in support of commercial activity, such as the e4books initiative and the development of bibliographic standards like ONIX. I should emphasise that a lot of what we do here is not in the scope of the latter part of this talk; this material is in addition to the work we already do both within divisions and indeed across the whole PA constituency, jointly with the Booksellers Association and indeed more widely too.

Like any trade body, a key function of ours is to provide a broad range of first rate information to members and other stakeholders. I hope that most of you will have seen our new website; that is in itself part way to what we will eventually deliver online. There is a large number of other things we are looking at; without saying too much at this juncture, by the time of next year's AGM the PA will be delivering substantially more substantially better information to its members, and indeed to the whole community.

Something that we do already is provide comprehensive and credible market statistics not only in our annual yearbook, which we've just published, but also to a significant level of detail in some of our members' markets like schools and Universities.

Finally, to be truly legitimate, a trade body must represent the large majority of its sector.  Although we do – we have over 80% of our constituency by turnover – we simply cannot afford to be complacent, and as many here will know already I am particularly keen to expand our offering to and our representation among SME publishers. A few steps have been taken down this road; more are planned, both in terms of services that we ourselves can offer SME members, who may be unlikely to join for our policy work alone, and in terms of the facilitation of information exchange on non-competitive matters between our larger members and our smaller ones. 

Equally, as definitions of what a publisher is change, the definition of what a publishers association covers must change as well, and as time goes on questions of scope will become increasingly relevant.

I have, of course, missed out an awful lot; but that brief picture of what we do at the PA should give a context within which what follows sits.

He who predicts the future is lying, even if he tells the truth (Arabic Proverb)

Before defining what it is we are looking to do in facilitating and helping our members develop tomorrow's markets, a brief reality check is in order. No music industry futurologists predicted before it happened that a major retailer in music would be an American computer company, let alone that it would be Apple, with the likes of IBM and Microsoft left for dust. Similarly, in our own space, the key disruptive innovation may be announced tomorrow, and none of us will know what it is before that happens.

Otherwise put, any attempt to define a strategic agenda for our industry, or rather our industries, must comprehend both the unpredictability of disruptive change and the pace at which it can deliver major shifts in consumption. 

Is this a threat or an opportunity? Clearly, both: but I draw comfort from the work of the German economist Riepel, who said in 1931 that innovation in media always adds to the totality, rather than subtracting from it. My own view is that the future entails new content reaching new audiences in new ways, and that just has to be a good thing for our sector and the industries within it. As accelerating convergence blurs boundaries between what today feel like very different kinds of consumption by different individual, corporate or institutional consumers, there are genuine opportunities, with the right collaboration within and across sectors, to deliver a much bigger pie for all.

Last week's London Book Fair and next month's Booksellers Conference both had “digitisation” as a focus, and between them will have covered large areas viewed from where we as an industry sit.  It would therefore be somewhat redundant if I gave my in-depth views on e-books, print-on-demand (and the exciting opportunities it affords publishers and booksellers), or immediately imminent consumer devices, and I'm not going to do so, though I will touch on some of these areas.  

Rather, taking as my point of departure that the primary purpose of the Publishers Association is to manage collective public affairs agendas, I am going to consider these questions from the perspective of government and government bodies domestically, at EU level and wider. 

One notable aspect of many of the views that I have found within Whitehall, Westminster, Brussels and elsewhere is that these questions are typically considered across all content industries: not just our sectors, but newspapers, magazines, audiovisual content, online games, music and so on as well – and that is true not just of consumer-oriented content but also of “professional” content. 

In formulating our positions and our responses to what these governmental bodies are doing, in particular in proactively defining what we think their agenda should be and in taking that to them rather than just following what they bring to us, it is critical that we take a cross-sectoral view as well. 

Of course there will inevitably be sector-specific nuances, and of course some key topics really are specific to certain types of publishing: open access mandates will never be a commercial concern to a pure consumer publisher, and rights reversion will never really concern a learned society or journals publisher.

Taking a quick look at where the various sectors we represent sit today, we can see some key differences in how content is acquired, licensed, delivered, and monetised.

Learned journals have been being delivered electronically for years. Historically, these have mainly contained one-way, textual and graphic data; experimental datasets are already beginning to follow, and the Open Access movement has put traditional business models under pressure. The brand value of the journal delivers much to the standing of the published article; it has been possible for many years for researchers to put their research outputs directly online themselves, but a properly peer reviewed article in a journal remains the gold standard of credibility and research value.

Professional publishers, a term which encompasses a very wide field of activity, are increasingly producing electronic products quite unlike traditional publishing outputs. For example, one of our members was recently proudly showing me their latest offering. It was a very intelligent legal search engine which, given fairly loose search criteria, would accurately find all relevant cases, and only relevant cases, from the canon of established case law. It's a wonderful system. It's a piece of software. We at the Publishers Association already have major members who are producing software as the product, taking content that is either not protected by copyright, or covered by crown copyright or similar, and delivering value through the intelligent automated parsing and comprehension of that content. That's a major departure from traditional models.

Educational publishers have to cope not only with the perennial raft of new exams, diplomas and curricula but with ever-changing ICT infrastructure in schools, colleges and Universities, as well as different modes of study, not least distance learning and the consequences that has for the management of intellectual property. Mixed-media content is already firmly embedded in outputs, and interactivity with the user is often assumed.  Consumption increasingly does not follow a buy-a-book, read-a-book model; rather, for this week's essay, a student will need a chapter of this and a chapter of that, and next week they won't need that content any more, but different chapters of quite different works.

Each of those three sectors – learned journal, professional and educational publishers – have natural partners to work with: the scholarly, business and educational communities; and indeed this is what they do. 

Trade publishers feel poised on the cusp of an e-book revolution, and indeed there are reports that consumers are starting to take an interest, with one major UK house recently reporting e-book volumes for the first two months of 2008 to be the same as the volume for the entirety of 2007. It is, however, fair to say that volumes remain tiny: no more than a few percentage points of any house's top line. This is no surprise, given the absence of a ubiquitous device to read e-books on. Commentators suggest that 2008 will see at least two plausible such devices launched in the UK.

There is, of course, no guarantee on volumes but there is a clear consensus that now is the time to digitise content, and the entire industry is investing and working hard to do just that.  This has created debates around reversion and digital rights – especially where these were not covered by the original head contract. A lot of “digital” activity to date has really been using the internet to market and sell physical books: the social-network widget, author sites and podcasts and so on, but e-books will be routinely available from publishers very soon for frontlist and backlist material.

Taking one step back and looking more broadly across other content industries, again we see key differences today in the way in which content is acquired, licensed, delivered and monetised. 

Magazines and newspapers have each traditionally relied heavily on advertising for income, and that remains the case as they digitise their offerings. Most if not all major players now routinely deliver content online and often make more money from doing so than from their paper-based products. Tellingly, very few consumer-facing magazines or newspapers now charge user for online access to what is typically at least the entirety of the printed content, and often includes interactive elements as well. Interestingly, a survey conducted by the Harrison group found that just under two thirds of American consumers pay greater attention to print ads in newspapers or magazines than advertising on the internet.

Business media, some of which is certainly within this sector – indeed our friends at the PPA have estimated the overall business media market at some £22bn – is, of course, routinely and richly delivered electronically today, as I touched on when I discussed our part of that constituency. The pace of innovation is particularly fast here, with advances in semantic search and social media market intelligence (to name but two) delivering new products to the market.

As an aside, common to the PA's sectors and magazines and newspapers are the subsidiary use of images. Many people in this room will have had first-hand experience in clearing rights for new use of an existing image, and I think it's fair to say that this area can throw up a few challenges. In general, the way rights are cleared differs across content types, and that represents a real issue in taking things forward.

Of course, when discussing consumer content on the internet, everyone's favourite whipping boy is music, and every industry commentator will strongly agree that we mustn't repeat the mistakes music made – though they will typically then differ on what those mistakes were or how to avoid them. Key lessons from music's experience include the need to keep things simple for the consumer, be clear on what the business model is and take a view on what technical protection measures are used to ensure content is only used as licensed. 

Something that is true both of music and of audiovisual content, i.e. TV shows and films, is that piracy has led legitimate download. And indeed this is possibly our first point of cross-sectoral commonality: before we even get into what markets could exist or what the relevant business models might be, we need to care about making sure our content isn't stolen and published on the internet by thieves, through peer-to-peer technologies or through other means. 

In my personal view, overprotective technical protection mechanisms do not dampen but exacerbate this theft, as frustrated consumers, prevented from doing what they thought they had bought the right to do, seek ways to circumvent the protections placed around content. And here I will, with apologies, point a finger at the music industry, albeit gently: telling someone who has paid money for a piece of software or equipment specifically designed to play music, who has also paid money for a file containing some music, that they may not play that music on this system, is in retrospect and with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight a grave error. 

I mention this example because the Kindle and the Sony e-reader, the two consumer devices currently available in the US, do not speak the same language: they require content in different format, and buying either one will not, a priori, grant access to the universe of digitised content, but a proprietary subset of it.  In my personal view this is in the interests neither of the consumer, nor the creator, nor the publisher.

Of course, consumers – whether institutional consumers, businesses or individuals – really don't want to care about much of what I've said so far.  How content is acquired is, for the most part, not all that interesting to them. What is interesting is, how do I get it, what am I allowed to do with it, does that marry with what I expect to be allowed to do with it, and can I get it transparently on “my shiny new bit of kit”.

Put differently, from the consumer perspective, content must be easily discovered, ideally through multiple routes. Licensing must be intuitive, simple and well communicated, at the user level – and I would reiterate that this applies as much to institutional purchasers as to consumer-focused product. Where technical protection measures are used they must be very straightforward or the user will eventually circumvent them.

A worrying trend is the increasing expectation that content will be free. This is particularly relevant to database, journal and non-fiction publishers; I will return to the Myth of Free Content later, but in considering how to monetise content in an online world this expectation of “free at the point of use” looms ever larger. 

Organisations like the PA exist to ensure that the industry's voice is heard within the corridors of power, locally, nationally and internationally. I'm sure no-one here doubts that the consumer – and again I am interpreting that word widely – has very powerful voices in just those same places, and this is some of what those voices are saying. An important part of the advocacy strategy I outlined near the start is to make sure that thought leaders and society in general understand not only what industry perspectives on these matters are, but also grasp why our voice is important, and our place at the heart of the cultural, scientific and educational life of the nation.

A lot of current expectation is centred on something called “Web 2.0”. Definitions of what this term actually means vary, and it's really not worth a lot of anyone's candle trying to iron that out too precisely; but, broadly, Web 2.0 centres on participative architectures: content and services delivered collaboratively online.

Another way of looking at it is that the consumer edits his or her own experience.  The emergence of power-browsing as a non-classical mode of consumption has been well documented, and might be viewed as a faster version of the putative student accessing course materials by the chapter for a limited time.  Content is pulled by the user according to his or her whim, and not pushed by the provider according to what it is considered the user should want (or would benefit from in someone else's view).

Nonlinear access to novels is not a novel concept – it's been going on for years.  What is new is the emergence of user-generated content, which can range from marking up one's own copy of a work, to co-creation with other users (from which artefacts of genuine value might emerge), to co-creation with authors or other content originators. There are plenty of examples of books and other products that have already been produced in these ways.  What there are, as yet, no examples of – at least as far as I am aware – are scalable models monetising this user-generated content, and that represents a real challenge. 

A survey for Deloitte and Touche in 2007 found that over half internet users regularly consume user generated content and 40% of them are generating it. One third of online content viewing is done on user-generated sites, and the younger the demographic, the higher that proportion.

Of course, everyone here loves hip-hop, and is deeply appreciative of the latest innovations in urban sound. But the concept of “mash-up” – or, if you must, the on-the-fly disaggregation and reaggregation of content – is by no means restricted to music.  Something Web 2.0 enables is taking a piece of content from here, another from over there – and the content can be of entirely different types – and putting them together to create a new work. Again, this raises obvious issues in terms of rights clearance and monetisation.  And we should be clear that the creator or rightsholder must a priori retain the right to refuse: as we all know, J K Rowling is currently embroiled in a case regarding the creation of a Harry Potter Encyclopaedia, which she felt crossed a line that other fan-generated content had not.

A strength of our industry is the extent to which it seeds activity in others.The novel occupies a unique place as the genesis of other cultural activity, and these multiplier effects form a key part of the economic value brought by our sector (for instance, \bn of world film revenues in the last five years arise from British novels). 

As an example, take the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. This work has generated hugely popular films, music, fan-fiction, scholarly articles, a wide variety of online and offline games, academic course materials, and even (God help us) fashion. Historically, this has happened over quite a lengthy period, with rights being negotiated and granted at each step. In a Web 2.0 world, these spinoffs – which lie at the heart of the multiplier effects – will be conceived and executed over much, much shorter timescales, and if we want to enable that activity and realise benefit from it, we must make sure that rights clearance is transparent, easy and consistent across sectors.

After two comes three, and many technologists – in particular many technologists on Government think tanks – discuss what has been termed “the semantic web”, or alternatively “the data web”. Definitions of what this actually means vary even more widely than before, but broadly where Web 2.0 automates the commoditisable – reading about potential holiday destinations, booking  a flight, attempting to settle a holiday argument, getting a divorce – Web 3.0 adds intelligence. 

To take a hypothetical example, suppose I am looking to go somewhere warm for ten days or so in August. I'd like somewhere with good local wine, plenty to do, with cultural and historical things as well as beaches and places to amuse children. Having six children, I will need somewhere non-standard to stay – the hotel is yet to be built that can contain us – and no single leg of the journey can last more than three hours, as some of my kids are young. 

Piecing that together today – from reading travel guides about various potential resorts right through to making several purchases – can take so long online that it's almost, but not quite, quicker to go to a travel agent. Under Web 3.0, the software through which I access the information has enough understanding of the data to be able to pull out what I want very quickly. Web sites become web services.

Moving beyond this rather trite scenario, one can very easily imagine point-of-care access to scientific, technical and medical research articles, with practitioners enjoying immediate access to key research outputs in their area of medicine; more generally in research, some of the back-breaking work of literature review could become automatable; some relatively straightforward legal matters (even contentious ones like boundary disputes) could be solved automatically (already some publishers are developing products to integrate into the workflow of lawyers); natural language search, returning outputs based not on algorithmic analysis of keywords and their proximity, back-links and advertising spend (which, broadly speaking, is how it's done today) but parsing and understanding sentences.  These will, some posit, be delivered through micro-applications which can run as well on your phone or camera as your PC; indeed, the increasing pace of convergence means that these devices are in any event decreasingly different. 

There are already programs which can scan a piece of music and tell you whether it is likely to be a hit, based on previous consumer behaviour. Maybe in the future, as you are writing a novel – or your team is co-creating it along with some people who will eventually be its readers – software will be able to tell you how many copies you'll sell, and even give advice on how to make it sell more. I'm not sure I don't find that a little scary.

Intelligent search engines, particularly in the field of business information, are already delivering parts of this vision in the professional sphere. Semantic search is not yet a mature technology, and Google or its competitors can often return results which are just as good; but as it is refined over the coming years I expect that to change, which has potential application across professional, academic, reference and non-fiction publishing in particular.  Vertical search is different from general search, and products that can focus not just on finding results but contextualising them will offer value missing from today's marketplace.

All of this may seem a little too future-perfect.  But it is exactly these kinds of vision of the future that motivate Governments and others when taking decisions or launching initiatives that affect us today.  Only yesterday, I was at a meeting where John Hutton (the Secretary of State for business, enterprise and regulatory reform) spoke of “blurring boundaries between sectors, [and] changes in how content is created and consumed”: he said “it is impossible to exaggerate the significance of what is happening today”.

So, what is the Government doing now? In the UK, we have just had the Gowers report on intellectual property, and I do not intend to go into any detail; suffice to say that among his recommendations, which taken together are broadly neutral for our sector, are a number of copyright exceptions specifically targeted at some of the issues I have discussed, notably format shifting.

As a joint initiative between DCMS and BERR (the Government department which by now must be fed up of the subtitle “what used to be the DTI”), a Convergence Think Tank (on which I sit) has been formed to examine the successor to the current Communications Act.  This is looking at a whole raft of important and relevant matters, including infrastructure, the digital divide, mobile data charging, networks and many others.  Its three over-arching themes are: open markets; [to] empower consumers and citizens; [and to] provide universal access to high quality content. This is, of course, bread and butter work for the PA.

At a European level, DGINFOSOC, which is the part of the European Commission working on “the information society”, predicts an €8.1bn market in “creative content online” by 2010 and perceives four “horizontal barriers” which might militate against this. These barriers are (briefly) the lack of availability of, multiterritory licences for and interoperable DRMs surrounding creative content online; and piracy. Although this strand of EU thought is predicated on “creative”, in other words cultural content, though there will be corollaries for all publishers from what happens here. 

I don't have time to talk through all of the four barriers but I will just touch on piracy.  Lord Triesman made a very welcome commitment to deal with peer-to-peer dissemination of stolen materials unless ISPs could come up with an industry-led solution, which – sadly – they are yet to do. When speaking at the London Book Fair last week Margaret Hodge, the Culture Minister, made similar comments. If Governments want to do anything today to assist the development of the markets I have been discussing, acting against those who turn a blind eye to the theft and promulgation of copyrighted outputs is surely an obvious first step.

There is a copyright green paper currently brewing at European level, and further developments relating to the European Digital Library, as well as numerous other strands; time precludes discussion of these, other than to remark that a number of points we work on stem from the same technological vision I outlined above.

In all of these initiatives, as well as others which are ongoing in various places, governments start from a very clear understanding of what other stakeholders want. The voice of the consumer is no stranger to the corridors of power, and if we want and expect government to work with us in nurturing and encouraging our industry and our peer industries, we must – and do – engage constructively over the long term. I believe that part of that engagement must be on strategic, cross-sectoral issues, aimed at developing a shared vision between governments and the industry – industries – of where we are all trying to get to. Trade bodies can so often be misportrayed as conservative, negative, reactive institutions; that's never been true of the PA, and it certainly isn't true today. 

It probably is impossible to get to a place where initiatives like Creative Content Online don't need long submissions from us pointing out (inter alia) that, actually, there is quite a lot of creative content online already, if only you go on the internet and look around.  But I believe it is in all our interests at least to try to build a shared understanding of digital opportunities and the rights and responsibilities all stakeholders might expect.

If I was going there I wouldn't start from here (Clichéd apocryphal aphorism)

So, where have we got to?  There are several bright, compelling futures possible at this juncture, some feasible, others less so, but no-one really knows what is going to take off and fly. Governments here and abroad are genuinely keen to engage and help deliver the benefits of those futures for the UK and EU as a whole, and take what they view as necessary leadership roles where they perceive industry as failing to deliver the goods.

A key difference in what I see from the perspective of “us looking out”, and governments and others looking in, is the extent to which we are not “the publishing industry” or even part of “the publishing sector”, but rather “a content industry”, alongside film, television, radio, music, online games and others. Governments see the way the outputs of these industries are consumed as converging: indeed convergence has, arguably, already started, and is bound to accelerate over the coming years.

An important reality is that, today, there are genuine cross-sectoral differences, some quite deep, in how content is acquired, licensed, delivered, monetised. There are technological and economic differences across sectors as well.

Cutting across all of this is increasing consumer pressure or expectation that Content Will Be Free, certainly at the point of consumption. That's something we've seen across all our constituencies, from the demands of the Open Access movement, through those who see peer-to-peer and other piracy not as theft but as legitimate activity, to those who would seek to extend and distort the concept of fair dealing to give away content without rewarding either the creator or the publisher who has invested both in that creator and the technology which delivers the content.

The challenges for us as the publishing industries – indeed for us as the content industries – include the need to:

•    Experiment with different business models
•    Speak the same language (for identification, discovery and expressing rights – c.f. ACAP)
•    Consider the transactional costs and process around rights clearance (and deal with the critical issue of Orphan Works)
•    Keep It Simple for the consumer
•    Work out of silos

In other words, we must agree how to enable future modes of consumption, allowing content to reach and engage more people in more ways, and meet consumer expectation and demand. What we mean by “publishing” is already changing and will continue to change radically, unpredictably and rapidly. 

There is already wide experimentation with different business models, whether in formal observatory-style environments such as that envisaged by the EU PEER project, in which the PA is closely involved, which will examine the impact of releasing scientific research outputs in different ways; whether through publishers releasing all or part of their content under new models or even for free electronically, seeking to drive revenue in new and innovative ways (and advertising cannot be anything like the whole answer here); or whether through examining the unit of production – to sell a book or license time-limited (or perpetual) access to individual chapters (or less). Indeed, the very definition of publishing is changing, with software and other non-traditional kinds of product being produced by publishing houses.

If we are truly to realise the full potential of digitised content, it is essential that we do certain things in the same way across not just the PA's sectors but across all content industries.  If new business models depend on being able to find different types of content, and conflate them on-the-fly, those pieces of content must all be marked up in the same way; in other words metadata must be applied consistently. 

An example of where this is already happening is with the Automated Content Access Protocol, or ACAP, which is an industry-led, cross-sector standard for the automated expression of complex rights information. ACAP is not tied to a business model but rather enables multiple different business models to interoperate and compete. Examples of its use to date include crawling of content held behind firewalls, which would otherwise not be accessible in search results. 

We should also work towards a unified framework for rights clearance. This might be supported by a system of micro-payments, or by some other method; but the existing cross-sectoral differences in how this is done today must be overcome, the important issue of orphan works must be resolved, and whatever is arrived at must be easy and intuitive for consumers, and open and non-proprietary. 

Finally, we must view ourselves in the context of the whole content sector, not just as this type of publisher or that type of publisher. Certainly, that is how those who regulate our sectors seek to deal with us, and we must be ready to engage positively and proactively on our agendas within that context.

The challenges for governments here, in Europe and more widely, include the need to:

*   Develop our national infrastructure
*   Encourage interoperability and collaboration
*  Remove obstacles to convergence
*    Allow ROI
*    Empower creators and rightsholders
*   Create maximum space for model competition
*   Define Public Service Content boundaries

Put differently, governments must encourage and enable cross-sectoral interoperability, remove obstacles from convergence, encourage continued investment from publishers and others, allow creators and rightsholders to decide how they want their content to be exploited, and allow different business models to emerge and compete with each other.

There are certainly infrastructure issues, both in terms of broadband availability and the bandwidth required to deliver video-on-demand plus fast web surfing plus telephony – very few households in the UK have the bandwidth really to enable that today. Another key issue is the digital divide; many people either can't or don't want to be online. A further issue is mobile data charges; it is entirely possible to pay more for the data transfer than for the content, which is bound to limit uptake of mobile data consumption. 

At this very early stage, I think it's quite clear that a light regulatory touch is essential: but light does not mean non-existent, and Government attention on piracy and theft is very welcome, as is work on ensuring that we have an adequate infrastructure both in terms of broadband and wireless connectivity to support new models. Of course, peer-to-peer filesharing eats up a lot of capacity and once that problem has truly been dealt with the bandwidth freed will be available for legitimate content.

What is important is that Government hands remain off as regards model evolution and competition. There is already considerable innovation, but more will follow, and it is entirely possible that something completely new will emerge at any time and change the world.

As ever, copyright is central to balancing the needs of all stakeholders, and allowing those who invest and are expected to invest in bringing these futures to fruition to realise a return when something works. Copyright has always been central to what we do here at the PA and I don't see that changing any time soon.

One final point: the BBC is a well-loved national institution and deservedly so; there are questions as to the legitimate boundaries of publically funded content, in particular where commercial markets are or may be affected. These questions can be difficult today; convergence makes them ever more urgent, and again we must work with the Trust and others to ensure that we all understand where the boundaries lie.

So, that is where we sit and where we might go, viewed at least partly from the perspective of those who regulate our industry. I started out by making the point that, actually, none of us really knows what is going to happen, and we must always understand that something unexpected could pop up at any time and radically change the landscape.

As the PA, I think it's very important that we seek to develop a coherent, cross-sectoral digital agenda, working on these issues as they affect all publishers; and to that end we are hosting a Summit Meeting on June 11 for key thought leaders around the industry.  Government officials from BERR (which used to be called the DTI) and UKIPO (which used to be called the Patent Office) have been invited and have said that they will come. I am delighted that David Worlock of Outsell has agreed to facilitate this session.

The other thing that we must do is seek to develop a coherent agenda across all content industries, in partnership with other trade bodies representing other sectors. To that end we are hosting a second Summit Meeting on June 30, and again key officials will be present. Once more, I am delighted that David Worlock of Outsell has agreed to facilitate this session.

The objectives of both meetings are to define agendas together as content providers and in collaboration with government; and as appropriate define structures to drive those agendas forward, in enabling and promoting future marketplaces.

If it was obvious what all of those agendas would contain, we wouldn't need the meetings.  As a starting point, some of the questions we might address are: how we create a transparent cross-sectoral framework for clearing rights; how we mark content up consistently across sectors, so that machines know what kind of content it is, where it comes from and how to display it; how to contextualise information so that machines can parse it better than they can today; how to leverage ACAP, a cross-sectoral standard for describing complex rights information. There are other areas and as we progress preparations for the meetings I'm sure yet more will emerge.

This is clearly a start, not a middle or an end, and complements the work we are already doing in partnership with other stakeholders on some of these matters.

The future will be better tomorrow (Dan Quayle)
 

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