Author: Michael C. Habib

Today Yahoo! announced their partnership with some academic libraries (Univ. of California and Univ. of Toronto) to digitize a ton of out of copyright materials. They also plan to digitize copyrighted materials. If I understand the details properly, there appear to be two main ways this differs from the Google Print project.

1. They plan to make all digitized materials, both in and out of copyright, freely available on the web to be indexed by any search engine that pleases. On the other hand, Google currently plans to keep books they digitize in only the Google index. The reasons for this difference are at least partially because of:

2. Yahoo! will only digitize copyrighted works when writers and/or publishers have given explicit permission to do so with the understanding that the work will be made freely available in its entirety. On the other hand, Google plans to digitize the entire collections of Stanford and Michigan allowing copyright holders the option to opt out of the program. In an attempt to stay within fair use, Google needs to keep the copies under strict lock and key and only display metadata and snippets based on a users search.

Both of these methods have their pros and cons. The new Yahoo! project is in collaboration with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive who is a great proponent of free books. Furthermore the project, called the “Open Content Alliance”, stresses the collaborative effort between all the partners. That they are allowing all of the books to be indexed by whomever is in fact a major move towards providing open content.

However, if Google Print can win the lawsuits to allow its project, this will be a major win for fair use. I read a bunch of articles on both. Hopefully I have most of the details right. I have been spending most of my time working on formatting this thing properly, but figured I ought to get a post in.