Yahoo! follows Google into print minefield

by admin October 4, 2005 at 11:18 am

No explosions, yet

Unlike Google, Yahoo! has set off into the book scanning minefield without detonating any explosions. But that might be because it hasn’t, as yet, gone near a mine. Yahoo!’s own book scanning plans went public today with the announcement of the Open Content Alliance, of which it is a founding member.

The OCA includes Adobe and HP, which will provide hardware and software licenses; and the University of California, and University of Toronto are lending their collections to be digitized. The material will be available as collections to other institutions, rather than being locked up on Yahoo’s servers.

The catch? Well, Yahoo! appears to be tip-toeing round the copyright controversy for now, opting to digitize works already in the public domain: on works to which copyright was never attached, or has expired. This possibly makes the OCA no more useful than the public domain collections we already have on the internet.

Although the more collegiate approach contrasts sharply with Google’s deal-with-it-or-else tactics – – the end result may be the same.

Full article: The Register