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Online Journalism News

Gavin O'Reilly responds to Google's rejection of ACAP

Posted: 13/03/08 By: Oliver Luft
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The Chairman of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has responded to comments about ACAP made by Rob Jonas, Google's head of media and publishing partnerships for Europe.

Jonas yesterday rejected the need for adoption of the ACAP rights management protocol, telling the Guardian Media Summit he was satisfied with the performance of the existing robots.txt terms and conditions protocol used by Google, saying 'the general view within the company is that the robots.txt provides everything most publishers need to do.'

In response WAN then issued a statement by Gavin O'Reilly accusing Google of 'glibly throwing mistruths about'.

"It's rather strange for Google to be telling publishers what they should think about robots.txt, when publishers worldwide - across all sectors - have already and clearly told Google that they fundamentally disagree," said O'Reilly, in the statement.

ACAP is attempting to engender a move away the existing robots.txt standard and establish a new set of tools that would give online publishers greater control and flexibility over the access they grant to the spidering technologies that search engines use to index web pages.

"If Google's reason for not (apparently) supporting ACAP is built on its own commercial self-interest, then it should say so, and not glibly throw mistruths about," the statement added.

"Publishers have specifically requested that Google respect the rights of content creators - which is a fairly uncontroversial request.

"Google should reflect on the fact that after 12 months of intensive cross industry consideration and active development - in which Google has been party to - publishers have identified not only the patent inadequacies of robots.txt, but more progressively have come up with a practical, open and workable solution for publishers and content aggregators.

"So, we - once again - call upon Google to embrace ACAP and to readily acknowledge the right of content owners to determine how their content is used."

Previous calls to large search engines to get involved have fallen on deaf ears. There has been little development since that would actively encourage them to get involved with a system that is seem by many as solely being in the interest of the content producers.

Times Online became the first newspaper website to adopt ACAP, last November. According to ACAP, there are now publishers and websites in more than 16 countries worldwide using the system.

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