So after Google Print, its about time Yahoo! announced something similar!! 😉
Yes indeed, as c|net reported, Yahoo! will also start its own project of digitizing print-editions of several books & will allow people to search through them and also download full books!! 😀 But what’s different in their program & Google’s is that unlike Google, Yahoo! has decided to avoid the controversies & probable law suits by sticking to only public domain content!! 😉 Google is ofcourse having a tough time as The Authors Guild sued them last week alleging infringement of copyright as Google is digitizing the copyrighted stuff as well. Their stand is that they adhere to the fair use doctrine under U.S. copyright law which allows people to place excerpts from the books in reviews etc.
Yahoo! on the otherhand will scan only public domain content which anyone can use & which has no copyrights stuck to it. It’ll also scan the texts whose copyright holders have given their permission. A wise move I’d say!! 😉 And its got backing as well, as HP Labs is providing the technology for scanning, Adobe is providing the licenses for Acrobat & Photoshop, & the content is provided by The University of California system, The University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in the United Kingdom, O’Reilly Media and Prelinger Archives, which contains books, speeches, audio, video and music.
Well, I think that Google just mis-calculated a bit by including copyrighted work without the permission of copyright holders & taking the stance that copyright holders must tell them to remove their stuff else it’ll be included!! That in my terminology is trying to breach others’ rights on purpose & is equivalent of being evil!! 👿 So is this the migration of Google to the dark side? 😕