Publishers attempt to head off future legal clashes with Google

Stan Beer
Thursday, 15 February 2007 17:25

Your IT - Home IT

As Google faces up to fines of up to 25,000 euros a day after losing its court battle with Belgian newspapers over the scope of its Google News service, a major pilot project is underway which newspaper and publishing advocates claim should put an end to future legal conflict between search engines and publishers and open up content to everyone.

The new project, ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), is a system by which the owners of content published on the World Wide Web can provide permissions information (relating to access and use of their content) in a form that can be recognised and interpreted by a search engine “spider”, so that the search engine operator is enabled systematically to comply with such a policy or licence. Effectively, there will be a technical framework that will allow publishers to express access and use policies in a language that the search engine’s robot “spiders” can be taught to understand.  

This project is the initiative of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the European Publishers Council (EPC), and the International Publishers Association (IPA).  The technical framework is currently being devised in a pilot scheme with the following participants:

* Agence France-Presse www.afp.com <http://www.afp.com> 
* De Persgroep www.persgroep.be <http://www.persgroep.be> 
* Impresa www.impresa.pt <http://www.impresa.pt> 
* Independent News & Media Plc www.inmplc.com <http://www.inmplc.com> 
* John Wiley & Sons www.wiley.com <http://www.wiley.com> 
* Macmillan / Holtzbrinck www.macmillan.com <http://www.macmillan.com> 
* Media 24 www.media24.com <http://www.media24.com> 
* Reed Elsevier www.reedelsevier.com <http://www.reedelsevier.com> 
* Sanoma Corporation www.sanoma.fi/english <http://www.sanoma.fi/english> 

Gavin O’Reilly, Chairman of the WAN, said: “We really want to avoid the kind of litigation brought by Copiepresse in the future.  ACAP provides a win, win situation whereby publishers’ intellectual property rights are respected and content is made more freely available to search engines. This system will completely remove any rights issues between publishers and search engines and therefore foster mutually beneficial business relationships between publishers and search engine operators, in which the interests of both parties can be properly balanced.  Content will be accessible to all and the present and future Internet strategies and business models of online publishers will be supported.”

ACAP is being designed to be applicable to every type of content published online, including video and audio, although the focus for the initial pilot project is on the specific needs of the print publishers behind it.  It is intended, however, that the completed system will evolve and develop to meet the changing needs of content owners, search engines, consumers and technology.

The question remains, however, as to whether web publishers outside of WAN will be interested in not having all of their content spidered by Google and other search engines. Most seem to think that it's beneficial to have free traffic driven to their sites.