DRMWatch reports on the efforts to develop standards for licensing on the Internet, including the hesitation of search engines to participate:

ACAP sounds like a great idea: instead of the search engines indexing whatever they want and publishers responding through litigation -- as has certainly been the case thus far -- why not agree on a machine-readable language for expressing the rights that publishers want search engines to have.

Such rights would include the right to crawl (index) the content, to display it in various forms in search results, to attribute its source appropriately (a la Creative Commons), and even to implement certain access models such as "first click free."