Like a promising Silicon Valley start-up emerging from stealth mode, the Open Content Alliance kicked off today with perfectly orchestrated press exposure, a clear sign that Alliance backer Yahoo is pulling strings behind the scene to score points against arch-rival Google. A bevy of major press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNET and others were clearly pre-briefed for the Alliance’s launch.
The Alliance, backed by not only Yahoo but also Adobe Systems, Hewlett-Packard, the Internet Archive, O’Reilly Media, the University of California and the University of Toronto, is pursuing a project to scan books and other materials into a vast online catalog of copyrighted content that users are free to, well, use without fear of running afoul of the copyright laws. The Alliance is giving authors the right to opt-in into the database, a departure from Google’s controversial book project, which has drawn the ire of the Authors Guild, among others.
But Google’s initiative, known as the Print Library project, has also garnered a good deal of respect from copyright thinkers, even if Google’s aggressive vision also frightened them. Google plans to scan in copyrighted material and allow authors to opt out of the process if they wish, a structure sure to result in a far larger library than the Open Content Alliance will generate.
Copyright attorney William Patry sees things Google’s way:
The purposes for the copies in connection with the Print Library project is to give people access to knowledge about the existence of the book as well as a tiny amount of text. That is of great help to researchers and hopefully to authors and publishers of the books too. It in no way harms copyright owners unless the project becomes something else, namely a full-text service which then is a market substitute.
Cynthia Brumfield at 12:41 PM|Comments(0)
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