p2p news / p2pnet:- Google is getting it in its virtual neck for wanting to turn the Net into a giant, online library tapping excerpts from the books of the world. Some 8,000 angry members of the Author’s Guild say Google will be violating copyrights.

But there’s money to be made and now Yahoo has decided to get in on it, doing a deal with the new Open Content Alliance (OCA), as it coyly pretends it hasn’t quite decided if advertising will be involved..

The OCA says it represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.

“Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo!” it says. “The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors.”

"We have not started talking to advertisers yet, because our main focus right now is the archiving project itself," Online Media Daily has Yahoo’s David Mandelbrot saying.

"There is definitely the possibility to monetize this content in the future, but we still haven’t decided whether we’re going to."

Providing the initial content, including books and multimedia such as spoken word audio, video, and music, will be The University of California, The University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in the UK, O’Reilly Media, and Prelinger Archives, says the story.

"We’re focused on companies like Hewlett Packard Labs and Adobe, which have the ability to provide technology that can enable this effort, in addition to libraries that have a lot of books and other multimedia works that we would be interested in digitizing," says Mandelbrot, according to DMNews, a web pub for online marketers.

"In addition, we’re working closely with the publisher associations in an effort to bring commercial publications into the Open Content Alliance."

The alliance differs from other content searches in that "users will have the ability to access an entire work, rather than just sniff at some available works," says Mandelbrot, coing on that the "potential" exists to include advertising in the OCA down the road.

"We’re at the very early stages," he says, adds DMNews.

"The focus is on bringing great content to the site. It’s too early to say what advertising on the site would look like."

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See:-
angry members – 8,000 authors sue Google, September 21, 2005
Online Media Daily – Yahoo! May Monetize Library Archives, October 4, 2005
DMNews – Yahoo Content Alliance Differs From Google Print, October 4, 2005

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