The Associated Press is hoping enriched metadata will stop others from scraping its scoops, an e-newspaper hosting and design service announced yesterday.

TownNews.com is a newspaper-specific Web publisher founded in Bigfork, Montana in 1989. Since then, TownNews.com's services have apparently expanded beyond initially automating news content to include optimising Internet traffic and, now, providing security to those losing profits from posting their wares on the Web. The e-publisher yesterday struck an accord with the AP to offer TownNews.com clients the option of implementing a microformat known as hNews 0.1.

hNews 0.1 was developed by the AP in partnership with a UK nonprofit, Media Standards Trust, using open source technology known as microformatting. This microformat has as its chief aim the prevention of copyright infringement. It strives to do this by embedding metadata indicating whether a given site is validly licensed to republish an article.

Metadata has been used historically to increase a site's searchability. Critics of the AP's plan to impose hNews coding on subscriber newspapers through its partnership with TownNews.com note that this digital watermarking technique cannot deter piracy because it does nothing to limit the practice of electronically cutting and pasting text directly.

TechDirt suggests that the biggest threat to journalism profits is the business model the industry has heretofore employed, not the technological packaging of its product. Others, such as Jeff Jarvis, suggest that the biggest threat to journalism is the AP itself, due to the ever-more-aggressive anti-piracy measures the non-profit news aggregator has launched.