Tools For Thought - Intelegia

For the past few years, premium content providers have been faced with the challenge of keeping a restriction on who gets to access information based on paying and non-paying individuals. Even though providers have built firewalls to prevent non-subscribers from accessing content, general search engines has found way to index paid content to offer to users. A clear example of this is an online newspaper offering articles for free for 7 days and then after the articles are archived. As the articles appear online, search tools such as Google may obtain a “cache version” or copy of the articles that will be stored on their server. As a result, search engines can offer access to content that would otherwise be stored away in a database and be available to paying individuals. Obviously, copyright issues are at the forefront when search engines and premium content are mentioned together.

Recently, a group of publishers have banned together to form, Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP). The protocol calls for, “a pilot project designed to help Web sites comply with publishers’ content use policies.” Precisely, ACAP is “an attempt to improve upon robots.txt, a voluntary measure for search engines that publishers claim is not sophisticated enough for today’s content and publishing models because it provides only a choice between allowing or disallowing the indexing of content”.

Although this is a great initiative to protect content providers and their respective bottom lines, time will tell whether some search engines will comply with the protocol. After all, search engines are in business to give unlimited access to information on the web (visible and invisible).