World Association of Publishers Doesn’t Speak Search
|
Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 22, 2006 | Share This
|
|
Sick of chasing copyrighted material around the Internet, an international group of publishers today announced an industry-wide initiative to stand up to search engines who aggregate their content. Lead by the World Association of Newspapers and encouraged by the recent court ruling in Belgium, publishers aim to launch the Automated Content Access Protocol before the end of the year. The ACAP is in theory an “an automated system, allowing search engine crawlers to recognize copyright content owners’ access and use permissions’ information, instead of merely allowing or forbidding them to search and index the content.” In other words, the publishers are testing their own version of robot exclusion tags, in the theoretical form of an ‘index for paying readers only’ tag. (how about requiring user login information?)
WAN accuses search engines of acting as publishers, by aggregating, indexing, censoring, and sometimes creating their own content. Indeed, Yahoo News intermixes exclusive Yahoo! reports with results from other news sites. Publishers see search engines as competition, and therefore demand compensation for the use of their content. Says Gavin O’Reilly, president of WAN,
“The search engines are increasingly aiming their strategic efforts at traditional content originators and aggregators like newspaper publishers…Google, Yahoo and other search engines are not some new breed of social benefactors of information - they are assuredly commercial, very-much-for-profit organizations. WAN is also extremely concerned about the behaviour of several major search engines when faced with the censorship demands of repressive regimes.”
WAN, a French organization, does not specify exactly how the ACAP protocol will function, but has budgeted roughly $600,000 for testing. According to Margaret Boribon, Secretary General of Copiepresse (the Belgian group suing Google), “I’m sure [Google] can find a very easy system to send an email or a document to alert the site and ask for permission or maybe a system of opt-in or opt-out.” When asked by Danny Sullivan if this “automatic query” system would look anything like the current robots.txt or meta robots systems, her answer was, “Our purpose is not to be excluded. Of course, we want to be in the system, but on a legal basis.” Soooo…. publishers want to be indexed, but with “permissions,” and the option to “opt-in or opt-out.” Furthermore, they dont want to insert a no-permissions tag themselves, but would like Google to “figure it out.” As Sullivan suggests, “this is simply an effort to force Google to the bargaining table and get paid for inclusion.”
In fact, the rest of his article pretty much takes the words out of my mouth. The idea that Google would pay them money to send them traffic emphasizes that publishers still don’t understand how search works. Furthermore, it’s ridiculous to assume that they can sustain a reader base by making content less accessible. Today Reuters announced that Google lost their appeal in Belgium, suggesting that more court cases are on the way. While I hope the pending legal battles don’t jeopardize the quality of search results, I’m with the rest of the search community, betting that the international press are in for a costly humiliation.
Topics: Google, International, Legal Issues, Publishing, Search: News |