Wow! Huge news today from Yahoo and the Internet Archive, among others:
The Open Content Alliance, a project that Yahoo is backing with several other partners, plans to provide digital versions of books, academic papers, video and audio. Much of the material will consist of copyrighted material voluntarily submitted by publishers and authors, said David Mandelbrot, Yahoo’s vice president of search content.
So Yahoo et al are going the opt in route, rather than opt out, which was Google’s plan. There is a lot of support for the idea that Google’s plan is completely within the bounds of copyright law, screaming from the various interest groups notwithstanding. It’s very interesting to see Brewster sign up to work with Yahoo on this…I’m curious to see where it goes.