In a post on the company's public policy blog, Google's senior business product manager Josh Cohen issued a response to the European Publishers Council, The Los Angeles Times reported. The council signed the Hamburg Declaration, which demands "new intellectual property rights protection to safeguard the future of journalism."

The meeting took place last month in Berlin, and was attended by news group chief executives from both the EPC and the World Association of Newspapers, who called for "online copyright to be respected, to allow innovation to thrive and consumers to be better served."

Cohen, in his response, pointed out that newspaper publishers could easily embed a code into their sites that would prevent news aggregation if they wanted to ban such activity on the part of Google and other search engines. However, Cohen wrote, "more than 25,000 news organisations across the globe choose to make their content available in Google News and other web search engines. They do so because they want their work to be found and read."

The Times article reports that "Google's search engine and its Google News site sends 1 billion visits to newspaper Web sites each month," which makes it unlikely newspapers will go so far as to completely block all search engines from crawling their content.

However, the publishing executives pointed out that the problem arises when others - search engines, aggregators, etc. - make a profit on the content, while the content creator gets nothing. This is usually done with ads built around news results, which content creators point out would not be there for the search engine or aggregator to profit from if they did not create them in the first place. Search in and of itself is not the issue.

"The Internet is not our enemy but rather the future of journalism, if intellectual property is respected in the digital world as well. In front of all I see two main goals: We want a fair share of the revenues, which are already being generated through the commercial exploitation of our content by others, as well as the development of a market for paid content in the digital world. We are confident that the representatives of search engines and other aggregators will join us in realizing and opening up the opportunities of the market for legitimate paid content in the Internet," said Dr. Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the Axel Springer AG and host of the signing ceremony.

Google's European Public Policy Blog, meanwhile, states that: "Some proposals we've seen from news publishers are well-intentioned, but would fundamentally change -- for the worse -- the way the web works. Our guiding principle is that whatever technical standards we introduce must work for the whole web (big publishers and small), not just for one subset or field."