While Google struggles to defend its own book archival project against copyright infringement charges, rival Yahoo! Monday said it had embarked on its own initiative to make the archives of various
libraries searchable by any search engine. For the initiative, Yahoo! has entered into a partnership with several groups, including the Internet Archive, Adobe Systems Inc., HP Labs, and the
University of California. The newly formed Open Content Alliance will run the venture. The new alliance will begin almost entirely with texts in the public domain, but will eventually move on to
copyrighted texts, at which point advertising possibilities may arise. -- Gavin O'Malley