Yahoo Search Steers Open Content Alliance Copyright Friendly Content Indexing

Yahoo Search Steers Open Content Alliance Copyright Friendly Content Indexing

Move over Google Print, Yahoo’s cooking up something a bit meatier. Yahoo has joined forces with The Internet Archive, Adobe Systems Inc., the European Archive, HP Labs, the National Archives (UK), O’Reilly Media Inc., Prelinger Archives, the University of California, and the University of Toronto in the formation of the Open Content Alliance. The Open Content Alliance is a global consortium focused on providing open access to content while respecting the rights of copyright holders. The Open Content Alliance will provide a wide range of material including cultural, historical and technological digitized print and multimedia content from libraries, archives and publishers. Content will be hosted in a single, permanent repository and complete works will be searchable and downloadable for free by anyone.

Governed by its contributors, the Open Content Alliance is designed to be a growing association that agrees to a set of openness principles. Initial content will be provided to the Open Content Alliance by founding members including the University of California, the University of Toronto, the National Archives (UK), O’Reilly Media, Inc., and the European Archive. Adobe Systems Inc., HP Labs, and Yahoo! Inc., also founding members, will make technical and in certain cases financial contributions to allow content to be contributed, placed online and accessed by anyone. The Open Content Alliance will include content ranging from historical works of fiction to children’s books to highly specialized engineering whitepapers. In addition to hosting content and playing an administrative role, the Internet Archive will provide the Open Content Alliance with material from its collections and it will also digitize content from contributors.

Yahoo! will power the search engine on the Open Content Alliance website and all Open Content Alliance content will be made available through Yahoo! Search, further bolstering the comprehensiveness of its index. Once content is available through the Open Content Alliance, any search engine will be able to index it. This takes a significant step in expanding the deep web, the millions of Web sites containing content that search engines typically cannot access, as well as advances the global sharing of knowledge.

In order to respect the rights of copyright holders, content under copyright will be made available through the Open Content Alliance only with the copyright holders’ authorization. At the option of the copyright holder, copyrighted content may be distributed through a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization whose licensing encourages personal use, reuse and repurposing of digital content. Content that is made available on the Open Content Alliance website will be available in PDF and other widely adopted formats. This approach enables mass media and independent publishers to expand their reach by submitting content that spans categories, file formats and languages while retaining their copyrights.

The Open Content Alliance will be funded by its contributors and will also accept donations from global institutions including governments, commercial entities and philanthropies. Like-minded entities interested in making open content widely available are encouraged to join the OCA.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/

sounds very similar to google's program of scanning thousands of literary books into their system and making them searchable. I think google's currently tied up in court on that one with the publishers complaining about ccopyright issues.

would be great though to have results from researched books rather than websites, think you'd need to have two seperate searh portals though one for books one for the web.