I read in an article arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/drm-for-news-inside-the-aps-plan-to-wrap-its-content.ars that Associated Press (AP) would like a bit more DRM control over information they publish on the web.

Now you might be forgiven for thinking that applying security to information you want to publish for public use, and to be incorporated, either by reference or as text, in the work of others, would be a challenge.  And you’d be right!

The reasons security is so difficult to introduce are:

-    content suppliers put accessibility above everything else;
-    web product providers want to be first to get the latest and greatest out there and grab whatever market share for themselves – regardless of the sustainability (more frequently lack of) of the economic model they are pursuing;
-    information security requires people to do something for which they do not perceive they have any gain or any responsibility, so they don’t bother.

So what is AP trying to do?  Introduce another HTML tag which contains the authors (or copyright owner’s) rights.

Now that’s not likely to set the world on fire, and I agree with the other security people talked to about this, it doesn’t change current security at all.  

But whilst the AP approach looks like fig leaf and mirrors (conceals and reveals all at the same time – a bit like the Windmill?) there actually is some value to it.

It doesn’t stop copying or actual theft and manipulation.  To achieve that it would have to envelope content and have a content licensing system, and that would be heavy, complex (for them to implement) and could have profound implications on their direct customers using them as a news feed.  Bad news indeed.

But it does achieve two things that will go a long way to solving problems caused by ‘deep linking’ where a web site links through content that is not its own, but makes it look like it is from them.  

The first is that by adding tags that will pass through the browsers unharmed, anyone doing nothing more than linking will be caught by a simple tool such as a web crawler, which can automatically process the apparent content and locate unauthorized content re-distributors who can then be investigated manually, and prosecuted when it is in the commercial interest of AP so to do.

The second is to establish a ‘standard’ (and they ought to be looking to join a European initiative on that front because this is not a competitive matter and because if you go for two standards the odds are you will lose both) by which authors rights can be represented, so that the encoding can get international recognition, and, perhaps, go on to become something that law can be used to dignify and recognize.  That would be valuable to the IT industry because it would set markers for how to start looking at the rules to apply to web content.  And you never know – DRM integration might just be starting.