The Open Content Alliance will be an opt-in project aimed at building an indexed archive of content. Yahoo and other companies announced the Open Content Alliance, and hope to make more content that currently exists in print and other media available in a digital archive.
Can Yahoo and the OCA win the hearts and minds of publishers? Can they top Google Print? And will they try to monetize their investment in the project? Write about it at WebProWorld.
The first content will come from American literature selected by the University of California system, a post on Yahoo’s Search Blog noted.
The Open Content Alliance looks like it wants to avoid the various legal issues that have attached themselves to Google Print. “The rights issues come in many flavors, but our guiding principle is to offer high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of the public domain,” according to the statement.
Lawsuits have been filed against Google in an effort to derail its initiative to scan the works of five major repositories of books. Complaints claim Google is violating copyrights and should not require a publisher to opt-out of their project.
Google has claimed its work will not violate copyright, and that the way it will return search results from indexed content will be on par with commonly accepted doctrines of fair use. In the post on Yahoo’s site, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle wrote: “We believe that donors should have the option to restrict the bulk re-hosting of a substantial part of a collection. This seems fair and is similar to the Creative Commons Sampling license.”
Yahoo plans to finance the digitization of the University of California’s contributed works. Others contributing to the effort include tech companies Adobe and HP. More books will come from the University of Toronto and tech publisher O’Reilly.
The OCA wants to have audio and video along with books available from the archive. Initial movie contributions will come from the National Archives of the UK and the Prelinger Archives.
Once content becomes part of the OCA index, it will be available for borrowing by others. Those borrowers, for example, would be able to download a digital copy of a public domain book, have it printed and bound, and sell it online.
Yahoo plans to make more details of the operation available on October 25th. The first digitized content should be available online by the end of the year.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
