The Association of Online Publishers (AOP), UK, has cautiously welcomed the campaign led by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) to encourage publishers to seek compensation from search engines which it argues exploit their editorial content for commercial gain.
"There's absolutely no doubt that quality content delivered by established brands is more valuable to consumers than the vast majority of content out there on the web," said AOP chairman Bill Murray, also managing director of group information strategy for Haymarket Publishing. "Currently, search engines probably don't do enough to recognise this and thus fail to be as useful/valuable to consumers as they could be."
The WAN-led taskforce has agreed to work together to examine the options open to publishers to assert their rights to recognition and recompense, and to ultimately improve the relationships between content creators/producers and news aggregators and search engines.
However, AOP said in a statement that it believes the WAN route is not necessarily the best way forward. Murray said, "To force them to pay for including this content is one possible route to address the concern, but there are others – including the search engines themselves taking the initiative and doing more to reflect the unique value of content delivered by publishers like UK AOP members."
The taskforce, which includes the International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP), the European Publishers Council (EPC), and the European Magazine Publishers Association (FAEP), plans to examine whether new standards and policies can be drafted to formalise the commercial relationship between publishers and the search engines and content aggregators, which it says provide a valuable service to publishers in terms of traffic generation but have built their business models in large part on taking content for free.
It will also explore the options open to newspaper, book and magazine publishers, including collective action, either at a national or international level, together with questions regarding copyright enforcement and brand infringement.
As one of its first steps, the taskforce has said it will be seeking meetings with Charlie McCreevy, European Union Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services, and Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media.
