"Focusing on digital content production and delivery is a key strength for publishers wishing to succeed with digital platforms, and proper content copyright management is an essential component of the most successful business models," said Roberto Antoniotti, Chief Executive of the Atex Content Management Division.

"Atex, the leading supplier of software solutions to the newspaper industry, decided to support ACAP in the future releases of its content management solutions to supply existing and new customers with more powerful and robust tools for digital content access management. I sincerely hope that this move will ease adoption of ACAP by publishers, thus setting a universal and open standard for access to content," he said.

ACAP is a new publishing standard that allows website terms and conditions to be expressed in a standard machine-readable format so that publishers can have a say in how news aggregators and search engine companies use their content. The project is a joint initiative of the World Association of Newspapers, the European Publishers Council and the International Publishers Association.

Atex, a strategic business partner of WAN in the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project (www.futureofthenewspaper.com), becomes a partner in the ACAP consortium that also includes news agencies, book and magazine publishers, libraries and search engines as well as newspaper publishers. Full details are available at www.the-acap.org.

"Atex will play a key role in helping publishers implement ACAP, which protects the rights of content creators," said Timothy Balding, CEO of the World Association of Newspapers. "Atex’s support is a major step toward adoption of ACAP as the universal permissions protocol on the Internet."

The European Commission, the United Kingdom government and many others have expressed support for ACAP as they seek to encourage self-regulation of internet copyright and avoid disputes between content producers and those that disseminate content produced by others, including search engine companies and news aggregators.

EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding said at a Publishers Forum in Brussels in December that "I very much hope that companies offering search engines will cooperate with ACAP. Here we have good possibilities for a win-win situation for all stakeholders, as publishers can link content with authorisations for access and use in a form that can easily be recognised and interpreted by a search engine ’crawler’, and thus helps avoid complex and costly legal disputes between content providers and search engines."

ACAP has also been cited as a possible new solution for end-uses of content in the UK Government’s major content industry strategy document. The document said that current web-based licensing systems have "limited application" and have not kept pace with developments. "Many publishers are not able to tune licences to users needs as they can with print," it said.

Endorsements of ACAP can be found here.

A list of ACAP members can be found here.

Instructions for implementing ACAP can be found here.

But while content providers are implementing ACAP, only one search engine company - Exalead, the fourth largest and a full partner in the project - has done so. The ACAP project is currently focusing on both publisher and search engine implementation.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying this week that the only barriers to Google’s implementation were technical, and he denied that Google was reluctant to embrace the system because of commercial self-interest. "It is not that we don’t want them (publishers) to be able to control their information," he said.

Mr Schmidt said that ACAP, as currently specified, is incompatible with Google’s proprietary search engine technology but that "we have some people working with them to see if the proposal can be modified to work in the way our search engines work."

Mr O’Reilly responded by saying, “We are pleased that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that they would be willing to implement ACAP if it were not for some technical incompatibility issues. As Mr. Schmidt knows, we have worked very closely with Google at a technical level throughout the past year in the ACAP project phase.

"Naturally, we are disappointed that we have yet to overcome their remaining technical barriers to ‘live’ implementation, but we have always stressed that we will do whatever is necessary to make ACAP work technically and seamlessly for all search engines. Our aspirations for ACAP have always been led by business needs and not by any preconceived technical solution," he said.

Mr O’Reilly said Mr. Schmidt’s statement, reported in IT Wire, "is hugely reassuring. We really look forward to continuing to work with Google to do the necessary work to match our business requirements with their technical specifications and thus make it possible for Google to immediately adopt the ACAP protocol for the benefit of digital publishing worldwide.”

ACAP seeks to extend and improve the current standard, called robots.txt, which allows publishers to accept or reject search engine "crawlers" that are used to find content and re-purpose it on third party websites like Google News. Robots.txt does not currently allow publishers any options other than allowing full use of content or to completely ban its use. The new ACAP standard allows publishers more options - for example, allowing aggregators to post content for a limited time.

ACAP works smoothly with robots.txt and does not cause any technical problems. Publishers can show their support by implementing ACAP on their website; full details can be found at www.the-acap.org.

The Paris-based WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, defends and promotes press freedom and the professional and business interests of newspapers world-wide. Representing 18,000 newspapers, its membership includes 77 national newspaper associations, newspaper companies and individual newspaper executives in 102 countries, 12 news agencies and 11 regional and world-wide press groups.

Inquiries to: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications, WAN, 7 rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: lkilman@wan.asso.fr.