European Commission Endorses Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP)

13th December 2007

With tensions growing between content providers and search engines, the European Commission has moved to endorse ACAP as one potential solution.

Speaking at the Publishers Forum in Brussels Viviane Reding, EU Information Society Commissioner, said "I am an enthusiastic follower of self-regulation to prevent or supplement legal provisions. I also believe that new technologies can support rights management and enforcement. Therefore, I am following the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) project - as one of many projects to ensure respect of copyright - with high interest and I very much hope that companies offering search engines will cooperate with ACAP".

ACAP is designed to inform search engines that crawl the internet looking for content to syndicate on what they can and cannot do with the material they find. ACAP is a free, open standard that is directly machine-readable by search engines and can be inserted into web pages by publishers to tell search engines what level of permission they have to use their search results. The protocol was launched in November in New York after 12 months of testing in conjunction with Exalead, a search engine. The move comes after a number of legal disputes erupted between publishers and search engines, most notably Copiepresse's action against Google where the Brussels Court of First Instance ruled that Google's practice of syndicating newspaper headlines along with short snippets of text to link to articles constituted an infringement of Belgian copyright law.

Further information on ACAP is available at www.the-acap.org