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AUSTIN, Texas - A consortium of publishers seeking greater control over how Internet search engines present Web sites has launched a universal permissions protocol which will, if adopted, increase protection of copyrighted online content such as newspaper articles and books. 40 Publishers in Initial Member Group The Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) is a revision of a voluntary 13-year-old system based on computer files called "robots.txt," text files most search engines looks for and use which control how or whether a Web site is indexed for inclusion in search engine results pages, or SERPs, a term coined by Brett Tabke, CEO of the WebmasterWorld Inc. online discussion forums. On Thursday in New York the consortium, which includes leading news organizations and other publishers, unveiled ACAP at the headquarters of The Associated Press, the result of a year long pilot program. Forty publishers are current members of the ACAP group, and among them are the following organizations:  | The Associated Press | | | Reuters | | | Association of American Publishers | | | Australian Publishers Association | | | Authors Licensing and Collecting Society | | | Copyright Licensing Agency | | | Deutsche Presse-Agency | | | European Alliance of News Agencies | | | European Newspaper Publishers Association | | | Gazette Communications | | | Motion Picture Association | | | News International | | | Newspaper Association of America | | | Random House Group | | | Recording Industry Association of America | | | International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations | Eleven additional publishers are pilot participants and will implement the ACAP framework, and include: | | Agence France-Presse | | | Exalead | | | De Persgroep | | | British Library | | | Impresa | | | Sanoma Corporation | | | Independent News and Media PLC | | | Reed Elsevier | | | John Wiley and Sons | | | Media 24 | | | Macmillan / Holtzbrinck | The European Publishers Council is one of the organizations behind the proposal, and its executive director Angela Mills Wade sees the system ACAP hopes to replace as being outdated and in need of improvement,  because it does not have, "enough flexibility to express our terms and conditions on access and use of content," Mills Wade said. "That is not surprising. It was invented in the 1990s and things move on," she said. The current voluntary robots.txt system allows webmasters to specify whether or how search engines may index either all or some of a Web site's pages, a task carried out by automated programs called "robots," "spiders," or "crawlers" run by each search engine. It was put together in 1994 by a loose affiliation of interested webmasters including Martjin Koster, who helped author an early version called "A Standard for Robot Exclusion". Search leader Google and Agence France-Presse have faced criticism from publishers for posting headlines, news summaries and photos without the permission of publishers, however it has steadfastly cited protection from the "fair use" provisions of copyright law which allow for small portions of original copyrighted content to be excerpted in certain cases. Google was the defendant in a lawsuit with AFP which it eventually settled, and paid the AP to avoid additional legal action. A "What's in it for the search engines?" Reaction Some webmasters doubt whether the voluntary ACAP system will be adhered to fully by search engines, which don't always strictly follow the current "robots.txt" system as it stands and have in some cases added their own extra rules to it. "What's in it for the search engines?", was the question asked by one WebmasterWorld member after reading about the new ACAP framework. "Ergophobe," an alias used on the popular discussion forums, sees the search engines having the upper hand over publishers. "I don't really see how the publishers can force the search engines to index and display their content only in a manner and time frame that the publishers approve of," the user said in a discussion of the proposed ACAP system. If a search engine decides not to add a publisher's Web site, such as an online newspaper, to its index, none of the newspaper's information would show up to searchers. Publishers and Web sites in general typically receive a large proportion of visitors due to appearing in a search engine's results pages, traffic which if removed could substantially decrease the number of Web users an online newspaper receives. Publishers and Search Engines in Copyright Battle Although the ACAP framework has been launched in part to "put an end to publisher-search engine legal clashes," it will first need to gain uniform implementation among the large search engine sites such as those operated by Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask.com. The ACAP project originates in part from disputes over the practice of certain search engines taking what publishers have claimed to be too much content from their Web sites and showing it to searchers in either SERPs or through other methods. ACAP, which includes groups representing publishers of newspapers, journals, magazines and online databases, was, "born, in part at least, against a growing backdrop of mistrust," according to World Association of Newspapers president Gavin O'Reilly. According to Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley, his news cooperative spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year and in some cases its employees put their lives at risk in order to provide news coverage, and the "free riding" of search engines hurts the AP's "economic returns on its investments," he said. While stressing the voluntary nature of the ACAP framework, writer Anick Jesdanun, in a recent AP article suggested that search engines can either implement the new commands or face legal action. "Search engines also could ignore them [ACAP guidelines] and leave it to courts to rule on any disputes over fair use," Jesdanun wrote. The reaction from Google appears to be a "wait and see" one, opting to spend more time studying ACAP before committing to use it. "Before you go and take something entirely on board, you need to make sure it works for everyone," said Google spokeswoman Jessica Powell. Publishers Unveil Universal Permissions Protocol Of the forty current ACAP members and eleven pilot participants, only one search engine has tested the system, the French company Exalead Inc., although the coalition organizers appear to have had informal talks with others. Representatives from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were present at the Thursday ACAP launch, and O'Reilly asked that the public not make too much of the fact that the top search engines have not officially endorsed ACAP, noting that their "lack of public endorsement has not meant any lack of involvement by them," O'Reilly said. The ACAP framework is expected to be extended over the coming months, a time during which organizers of the coalition will carefully observe how the top search engines and the pilot program testers react to and implement what is being called "robots.txt 2.0." Related Links:
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9:14 pm on Nov. 30, 2007 (utc 0)
