Yahoo, partners debut scan plan

Authors Guild, citing copyright, sues to stop Google project

By Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 10/15/2005

Days after the Authors Guild announced a suit to block Google's scan plan (below), Yahoo Inc. unveiled its own ambitious project. Yahoo will join with Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive, among others, to scan, index, and make available library holdings under the moniker The Open Content Alliance (OCA). Beyond books, Yahoo's program will scan anything participants deem useful on the web.

Perhaps the OCA's most important distinction from Google is its ground rules—in contrast to Google, the OCA will only accept material either in the public domain or where the rights and permissions have been properly cleared. Yahoo VP of search content David Mandelbrot described the Yahoo program as “collaborative” and “novel.”

On the Yahoo Blog, Internet Archive founder Kahle explained the alliance and the contributions of its initial partners: “The Internet Archive will host the material and sometimes help with digitization, Yahoo will index the content and is also funding the digitization of an initial corpus of an American literature collection that the University of California (UC) system is selecting, Adobe and HP are helping with the processing software, University of Toronto and O'Reilly are adding books, Prelinger Archives and the National Archives of the UK are adding movies, etc. We hope to add more institutions and fine tune the principles of working together.” Kahle said some OCA material will be available by the end of the year.

“The costs,” he added, “are mostly being borne by the host institutions based on their own fundraising or business models. The cost of digitization is sometimes offset by a different party. We think this can scale to millions of books movies and audio recordings.”

Three authors, joined by the Authors Guild, a professional writers' association with over 8000 members, filed suit September 20 in a Manhattan federal court to stop Google's Print for Libraries program. In a statement, Authors Guild president Nick Taylor said Google's plan to digitize books from five university libraries, including the entire book collection of the University of Michigan (UM), represented a “plain and brazen violation” of copyright law. The complaint seeks damages and an injunction to halt further Google scanning efforts.

The suit came just weeks after Google, in conversations with publishers, had announced voluntary changes to the program, including giving copyright owners the chance to opt out of library scanning. “We regret that this group chose to sue us over a program that will make millions of books more discoverable to the world,” Susan Wojcicki, Google's VP for product management, wrote on Google's blog. She described the Google Print program as being “like an electronic card catalog,” indexing book content to help users “find, and perhaps buy books.”

Michigan's James Hilton, associate provost for academic information and technology affairs and interim university librarian, told LJ that, while disappointed that the project led to legal action, he was convinced the program was within the bounds of copyright. “What we don't want,” he stressed, “is for people to lose sight of the enormous public benefit that comes from this project.” (See “LJ Talks to”.)

That sentiment was echoed by Stanford law professor and copyright expert Lawrence Lessig, who, writing on his personal blog, defended Google and the public's interest in the project, calling it “possibly the most important contribution to the spread of knowledge since Jefferson dreamed of national libraries.” Given “the total mess of copyright records,” Lessig argued, there is “absolutely no way to enable this sort of access to our past while asking permission of authors up front.”

Publishers were quick to praise Yahoo's approach, and to support the Author's Guild suit. The Association of American Publishers and the Association of American University Presses both issued statements supporting the Author's Guild. Michigan's Hilton, however, suggested publishers had little to fear from Google. “The fact is that libraries and universities have a vested interest in healthy publishing,” he said. “The Google project might allow libraries to rationalize their long-term storage strategies. But it's not going to impact our acquisitions.”

Meanwhile, as commercial search engines compete to add content, libraries and their patrons could end up the big winners. “There is a huge window of opportunity based on the search engines' competition with each other,” UC's Daniel Greenstein told LJ. “MSN is, I'm sure, waiting in the wings, and other interests are also out there with money ready to spend.”

However, Greenstein warned, the race to add content also brings with it a challenge. “If the academic and library communities don't begin to define what our basic requirements are for a massively digitized openly accessible file, we could find ourselves just being taken advantage of.”

Libraries, he said, have more to gain by coming together, than from being “picked off” deal by deal. “Right now there is UC and Toronto with Yahoo, five others with Google. It would be so much better if we could all somehow come together and assert our influence more as a cartel, more as a community, and use that to leverage something we need.”