Content Owners to Charge Royalties for Searching?

dwarfking writes in with a story that follows up on the impact of recent Google events: "Ok, maybe I'm a little dense here, but isn't this plan more of an impact to the content provider than to the search engines. From the article: 'In one example of how ACAP would work, a newspaper publisher could grant search engines permission to index its site, but specify that only select ones display articles for a limited time after paying a royalty.' So, ok, a search engine company decides it doesn't want to pay royalties and therefore doesn't index the provider's site. Now won't the provider actually lose readers since their articles won't be locatable by search anymore?"

Comments

About robot.txt

[HatchedEggs]

BTW, the Belgium newspapers, when asked about why they didn't just use robots.txt, stated that it should not be on their shoulders to have to keep others from misuing their copyrighted work.

What this translates to is that not only are they too lazy to spend 5 minutes updating their site so that Google doesn't index it, but then they fail to understand the benefit that they obtain from Search engines. Which in reality is probably quite great.