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The World Association of Newspapers, European Publishers Council, International Publishers Association and European Newspaper Publishers' Association are backing ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), an automated system that allows online publishers to provide information about access to and use of their content. The information is provided in a form that can be recognised and interpreted by search engine crawlers and details the terms under which content can be used.

'This system is intended to remove completely any rights conflicts between publishers and search engines, said Gavin O'Reilly, President of the World Association of Newspapers, which represents more then 18,000 publications. 'Importantly, ACAP is an enabling solution that will ensure that published content will be accessible to all and will encourage publication of increasing amounts of high-value content online.'

He added that the initiative will go some way to easing the growing frustration of publishers, who continue to invest heavily in generating content for online dissemination and use.

Francisco Pinto Balsemão, chairman of the European Publishers Council, a group of chairmen and CEOs of European media corporations, said that ACAP will increase access to digital content.

'It

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will facilitate greater access to our published content, making it more, not less available, to anyone wishing to use it, while avoiding copyright infringement and protecting search engines from future litigation,' he said.

The announcement of ACAP comes as the number one search engine operator, Google, is in dispute with Belgian publishers over the reuse of their content in its news aggregation service, Google News. Google is appealing a Belgian court ruling that it cannot reproduce headlines from several of the country's newspapers.

The appeal has been scheduled for November, but in the meantime Google has complied with a court order that it must publish the original ruling on its Belgian homepages. Although legal constraints have prevented it from commenting on the specifics of its appeal, Google's European director of Communications and Public Affairs, Rachel Whetstone, reiterated that any publisher that does not want its content to be indexed only has to ask or block Google's Web crawler.

'Of course, if publishers don't want their websites to appear in search results (most do) the robots.txt standard (something that webmasters understand) enables them to prevent automatically the indexing of their content. It's nearly universally accepted and honoured by all reputable search engines,' she said.

'Google News is no different than Google web search in this regard: We only ever show the headlines and a bit of text. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the newspaper's website. And if a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News we remove their content from our index - all they have to do is ask.'