Publishers urge legislators to supervise the online spreading of news

An international group of publishers an content providers fears the end of independent journalism. The hold sites like blogs and sites that link to premium content accountable for this trend.

In an attempt to counter this development, the publishers have signed the “Hamburg Declaration”. The petitioners urge governments for legal support of a means to protect content that was developed by the content providers themselves.

This protocol, called ACAP (Automated Content Acces Protocol) enables content providers to set limits to the use and re-use of their content. ACAP users, for example, can restrict third parties in attempts to save files in another format, to translate them or use more than a certain number of words from an original article.

The organisation wants the support of the European Commission and other governmental bodies in their opinion that search engines need to acknowledge ACAP and respect the intellectual property of the content providers.

ACAP is being used internationally by a large number of content providers like the Motion Picture Association, Reuters, AP, publishers Reed Elsevier, Sanoma and Wolters Kluwer. A considerable list of Dutch news media also uses ACAP, amongst which dailies Parool and Algemeen Dagblad.