Yahoo! leads plan to put books online for free
Recently a consortium led by Yahoo announced plans to begin scanning books to make them available for free online, in what appears to be a direct challenge to a similar project from Google. The Open Content Alliance (OCA) plans to digitise hundreds of thousands of books over the news few years. They will range from fiction to academic texts. It will start with books that are out of copyright. The group hopes to avoid the controversy stirred up by Google by asking copyright holders to opt into the scheme. The consortium also includes HP and the UK's National Archives.
This is interesting. It would certainly be a great resource for the world.
I think the problem starts where copyright comes in.
(at October 16, 2005 12:49 AM)
This is good news, indeed. Competition always ads to the quality.
Copyright issues are complicated, especially when it comes to making cpyrighted material freely available to the whole world. And I wonder which law do Yahoo! and Google follow? The US law? The EU law? some international law?
At least while the legal issues are being discussed, these giant companies would be able to try and solve the project's technical issues.
interesting...
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