UPDATE: So Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) won’t be implementing ACAP after all, at least in the foreseeable future, despite earlier speculation that it could become the first search player to back the publisher-friendly news indexing technology. The company’s lead counsel on intellectual property Tom Rubin told an AOP forum on copyright in London today that ACAP had the “potential to be an important element of more vibrant business models for publishers in the future”. But Rubin told me afterwards that Microsoft currently has “no plans to adopt ACAP into any of our products models”. The door may be somewhat open for the future—Rubin clearly doesn’t think the current robot.txt web crawler technology used index news stories is any good, likening the 15-year-old technology to “putting a Fiat engine in a Ferrari”.

— No free lunch: So no ACAP, but Rubin had much else to say about online newspapers: he says the free, ad-supported online content business model almost every newspaper has adopted has simply not worked. “In the early 1990s, some leading internet pundits… implored content owners to give away content and monetise it through secondary means,” he says. “Well, here we are ten years later bombarded almost daily be announcements of newspaper lay-offs and closures.” For Rubin the evidence is in: the free approach not only doesn’t work, “it has been a disaster for almost all newspapers”.

— Time for change: Like Obama, Rubin say’s it’s change we need—instead of accepting that content must be free and unregulated, publishers can seize control. Rubin cites the defeat of the grand-daddy of music P2P file-sharing site Napster (NSDQ: NAPS) by music labels and their copyright lawyers and Viacom’s successful $1 billion copyright action against YouTube as proof that original content can be protected and monetised. His parting shot to the free content evangelists and newspaper doom-mongers: “Don’t let anyone tell you that the choice is between Luddite resistance to new technology and passive acquiescence to the destruction of your industry.” Original post after the jump...

Original post: Could Microsoft be the first big search player to embrace ACAP, the internet search protocol designed to give publishers more control over their online content? IHT reports the company’s lead intellectual property lawyer Tom Rubin is expected to tell an AOP forum on copyright in London later today that he would work more closely with publishers on ACAP, which gives them more control over how search engines index articles than the existing 15-year-old robot.txt web crawler technology. According to the IHT, Rubin will say ACAP “has the potential to be an important element of more vibrant business models for publishers in the future.” That’s not a full endorsement, but it goes further than Google (NSDQ: GOOG) which has only said it would talk it over with ACAP.

Since its full launch a year ago ACAP has been a passionate cause of the World Association of Newspapers and its president Gavin O’Reilly, also COO of Independent News and Media. At first INM’s UK and Ireland sites and then The Times were the only British publishers to sign up but, according to a document released last week, ACAP now counts The Guardian, the Mail on Sunday, The Sun and Northcliffe Media’s local websites among its members.

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