usion of copyrighted books is widely
criticized by authors and publishers worldwide. In the US, lawsuits
were filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American
Publishers (AAP) for alleged copyright infringement. The assumption is
that the full scanning and digitizing of copyrighted books infringes
copyright laws, even if only snippets are made freely available on the
search engine. To counteract copyright concerns and the problems of a
closed platform, the Internet Archive launched the Open Content
Alliance (OCA) with the goal of digitizing only public domain books and
make them searchable and downloadable through any search engine.

2005: OPEN CONTENT ALLIANCE

[Overview]

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was conceived by the Internet Archive
in early 2005 to offer broad, public access to the world culture. It
was launched in October 2005 as a group of cultural, technology, non
profit and governmental organizations willing to build a permanent
archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The
project aims at digitizing public domain books around the world and
make them searchable through any web search engine and downloadable for
free. Unlike the Google Print project, the OCA scans and digitizes only
public domain books, except when the copyright holder has expressly
given permission. The first contributors to OCA were the University of
California, the University of Toronto, the European Archive, the
National Archives in the United Kingdom, O'Reilly Media and Prelinger
Archives. The digitized collections are freely available in the Text
Archive of the Internet Archive. In December 2006, they reached a
milestone of 100,000 digitalized books publicly available, with 12,000
new books added per month. Two years later, in December 2008, one
million books were "posted under OCA principles or otherwise public
domain hosted by the Internet Archive."

2006: MICROSOFT LIVE SEARCH BOOKS

[Overview]

Microsoft has also participated in the Open Content Alliance (OCA),
launched by the Internet Archive in October 2005. In December 2006,
Microsoft released the beta version of Live Search Books. The book
search engine performs keyword searches for non copyrighted books
digitized by Microsoft from the collections of the British Library,
University of California, and University of Toronto, followed in
January 2007 by the New York Public Library and Cornell University.
Books offer full text vi