Search

The article focuses on the refusal of the world's largest search engine companies to support the automated content access protocol (ACAP). It relates that the protocol will acknowledge publishers' rights to control their content once it is captured by search engines. However, the author notes that Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo! Inc. decline to support the protocol, instead they continue to endorse robots.txt, which only grants or denies access to a search engine's crawler to collect information. It also mentions that Google asserts that the ACAP protocol is incompatible with its search technology as its reason for not supporting it.

The article reports on the preparation of Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) for pre-existing governance organization in the U.S. ACAP was launched in October 2006 to encourage easy availability of high-quality online content, as well as to prevent legal disputes between content providers and search engines. ACAP is still waiting the responses of Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Gavin O'Reilly to participate in the initiative. However, O'Reilly advises them to discuss with publishers, rather than concede them with copyright disagreements.