Copyright Law

James Grimmelmann has a useful post today about the Automated Content Access Protocol.  ACAP describes itself as:

a joint initiative by the World Association of Newspapers, the International Publishers Association and the European Publishers Council. Working with leading publishers, search engines and other technical and commercial partners, a global, open and flexible standard for the communication of rich information on access and use of content on the Internet has now been developed.

Or as James describes it: "It?s a proposed protocol by which content providers will tell Google how to do its job."

The concern, of course, is that if the publishers insist on telling search engines how they want their content to be indexed and searched, they might attempt to sue for failure to respect the conditions that they set.  Those conditions may not promote access to knowledge.