European publishers have offered an olive branch to Google in a bid to end copycat copyright challenges to the internet search engine's news service.
Google lost a court battle with a Belgian newspaper association Copiepresse in a landmark ruling on Monday and was ordered was ordered to remove content or face daily fines.
Belgium's ruling came as other lawsuits loom for the popular search engine, including an important legal challenge to Google by the news service Agence France-Presse (AFP).
But Europe's press associations have come forward with a new project to "put an end to future legal conflict between search engines and publishers and open up content to everyone".
A technical fix to copyright issues has been developed by World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the European Publishers Council, and the International Publishers Association – and participants include AFP, the French Google litigant.
WAN Chairman Gavin O'Reilly said: "We really want to avoid the kind of litigation brought by Copiepresse in the future.
"This system will completely remove any rights issues between publishers and search engines and therefore foster mutually beneficial business relationships between publishers and search engine operators."
The new system is dubbed the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), a technological means for internet publishers to provide permission relating to access and use of their content.
The protocol aims to develop a "language" that search engine robot "spiders", automatically trawling the world-wide-web looking for content to build Google News or other services, "can be taught to understand".
Google has welcomed "any initiative that enables search engines and publishers to work together more closely".
"We look forward to discussing this proposal with the WAN and in particular how it can build on robots.txt - the nearly universally accepted internet standard which already enables publishers automatically to prevent the indexation of their content and is honoured by all reputable search engines," a spokesman said.
