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

Re:Since when did the world work for Google?

[mccalli]

If they disagree with how Google works, they should block googlebot, or at minimum, create a robots.txt

No, that's missing the point of what I said again. I said - since when did the world work for Google? I don't want to do extra work because someone is misusing my copyright, I want them to abide by the copyright in the first place.

For just appearing in google.com's search index I have little sympathy for the sites' case. But look at Google News and tell me it isn't becoming a publisher. At the very least it needs to decide which articles should feature more prominently, whether by machine or not. I'm sticking by my normal privacy principles over this - opt in, not opt out.

Cheers,
Ian