"The specs clearly weren’t written by people with any experience in writing technical standards," writes Tim Lee, an expert author at the TechDirt Insight Community. "While a well-written standard will very precisely specify which behaviors are required, which are prohibited, and under what circumstances, the ACAP spec is full of vague directives and confusing terminology."

Indeed, if you look at the list of members, you’ll notice a trend: it’s all publishers, many of which have had their legal conflicts with Google especially. It consists of the Associated Press, Association of American Publishers, Agence-France Presse, among many, many others.

As described on the ACAP homepage, the standard is intended to become a universal permissions protocol that allows content owners to communicate permissions for access and use of online content. In short, it’s intended as a way for publishers to tell search engines exactly what can and cannot be done with their content.

And while the idea might be acceptable and even have "promise," James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School with expertise in both computer technology and law, says the vague, imprecise technical language of it could leave it open for expansive interpretations under the law:

"I’m concerned that the publishers will soon argue that failure to respect every last detail expressed in an ACAP file will constitute automatic copyright infringement, breach of contract, trespass to computer systems, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (and related state statutes), trespass vi et armis, highway robbery, land-piracy, misappropriation, alienation of affection, and/or manslaughter."

Some might note a hint of sarcasm there.

“ACAP will give content owners the confidence to allow search engines to index their content under clear terms of use,” the organization behind ACAP’s development said in their FAQ.

“To date, many aggregation websites have chosen to adopt a liberal attitude to copyright – ‘it’s OK until someone tells us it isn’t’ – which means there is an enormous amount of infringing material being hosted by major companies,” said the group.

That “liberal attitude” has been Google’s regular contention about not just online content, but that of its book search project. Google’s book scanning has angered publishers due to the search giant’s position that publishers need to actively opt-out, rather than Google proactively seeking permission to index.

Publishers consider robots.txt too simplistic with its allow/disallow choices for spiders and directories or types of content. “These simple choices are inconsistently interpreted,” ACAP claimed; search engines will likely find that opinion a surprising one.

ACAP extends what robots.txt presents to crawlers, in a standard form. For example, a time limit value can be defined, telling the crawler the publisher wants certain content to expire and be removed from an index after a given date or period of time.

From a cursory review of the technical documentation, ACAP looks like a way for publishers to establish usage guidelines that they can utilize in lawsuits against search engines. Though publishing groups have backed the standard, major search engines like Google and Yahoo are not represented in ACAP’s supporters.

This could be a step toward gearing up for a fight with the search engines to force them to comply with ACAP as they crawl available online content. We won’t be surprised if the search engines respond by disallowing the spidering of any ACAP-enhanced sites until everyone reaches a public common ground where they accept ACAP as an extension of the robots.txt standard.

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