Yahoo-Led Consortium Seeks To Rival Google's Print Search Initiative

by Glen Shapiro, LawAndTax-News.com, New York

04 October 2005

A consortium led by internet search portal, Yahoo is seeking to create an online database of out-of-copyright and Creative Commons licensed books.

The initiative announced by the group, which is calling itself the Open Content Alliance, is similar to that recently unveiled by Google, with the one crucial difference that Yahoo will not allow the search of copyrighted material without the express permission of the copyright owner.

Google has run into opposition to its plans to allow small sections of copyrighted material to be searchable, and was last month dismayed to find itself facing legal action from The Authors Guild.

Yahoo and its partners in the venture, which include Adobe Systems, Hewlett Packard, the Internet Archive initiative, the UK's National Archives, and the European Archive, are initially funding the scanning of 18,000 out-of-copyright American classics. These will include works by Henry James, Mark Twain, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal on behalf of the Open Content Alliance, Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, announced:

"There's all sorts of controversy surrounding in-copyright work. Let's at least get the public domain publicly accessible."

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