Now that we have all seen the drama related to the Belgian court ruling this month in which Google was found guilty of infringing the copyright of Belgian newspapers by publishing verbatim excerpts of their stories in search results on its news site.

It is heard that Newspapers are fighting to regain control of how their stories appear online. The World Association of Newspapers announced last week it is developing an automated system for granting search engines permission to use their content.

The WAN’s new system is likely to be an Automated Content Access Protocol, which will convert print publishers’ terms of use into a form that the search engines’ robotic “crawlers” can understand. It says the system, to be launched this year, maybe this will help avoid future legal clashes between search engines and publishers.

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