Google vs. publishers: How to best protect online copyright

ACAP may or may not be the right technical answer for the Web, but if nothing else, it sets up a starting point. It's something that should be welcomed by the content aggregators," O'Reilly said.

Drummond said robots.txt is honoured by all legitimate search engines, and gives publishers tremendous control over how content is shown in searches

"We haven't made the decision on whether to support [ACAP] or not. We believe more granular communication between search engines or content sites is needed, but robots has been around for 15 years, it is used by millions of Web sites, every search engine uses it. Google didn't create it and doesn't control it," he said

Google is concerned that adopting a platform like ACAP for just one content industry wouldn't work for all content creators. "We want to make sure it works for everyone. Others are worried about ACAP breaking the model they're used to," he said.

Drummond announced that Google is launching a separate crawler for Google News to give publishers more control.

"That means that if you choose, you can give Google one set of instructions for how we should treat your content in Google News and a different set of instructions for Google Search," he said. "The solution will mean new technological ways to reach audiences, both wide and narrow, to keep them engaged longer and to generate more money. It will mean new models that combine free and paid access to content. It will mean better display advertising that makes more money for publishers."

O'Reilly said one initiative by one search engine does nothing to answer control issues publishers have with other search engines.

"It's not just Google and Yahoo, and what we need is an industry solution, and we can't have a solution that just works for Google and not Microsoft or Yahoo," he said. Google's creations on their own, although "brilliant," still don't give publishers the power to help create something and have it work with all search engines, he said.

O'Reilly also said the longer content creators and search engines wait to come up with an agreement, the more difficult it will be for publishers to choose how their content is used, distributed and paid for. "What is clear is that, collectively, we haven't made copyright work properly on the Web, and that is down to we content creators who have, perhaps foolishly, failed to enforce our copyright."

Drummond denied Google violates copyright, saying that the issue "is not a question of Google not respecting copyright - this is a fundamental disagreement when you're applying copyright rules on teh Web." He said publishers who view site indexing as a violation "flies in the face of how the Web has been built and how it operates ... You need a system that doesn't automatically make the Internet illegal. I think you can go too far, and copyright is a balancing act, like many other laws," he said. He also said the widely held belief that Google has built its business on the backs of content creators just isn't true.

The suggestion we're making big profits on news is incorrect. Search result ads are more lucrative. News result ads are only a tiny fraction of overall search revenue," he said, but would not give an estimated figure.

Although the issue could not be solved in the two-hour session, Drummond and O'Reilly did agree that more discussions and meetings between publishers and the search giant are necessary to find a fair solution for all involved.

"Fighting isn't constructive," O'Reilly said. "Publishers do want to have a more concrete dialoge. I think it's possible to get consensus."