After three years of conflict, Google reached a settlement in October 2008 with associations of authors and publishers, with an agreement to be signed during the next years. The inclusion of copyrighted works in Google Books had been widely criticized by authors and publishers worldwide. In the U.S., lawsuits were filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for alleged copyright infringement. The assumption was that the full scanning and digitizing of copyrighted books infringed copyright laws, even if only snippets were made freely available, whereas Google thought this was "fair use", referring to short excerpts from copyrighted books that could be lawfully quoted in another book or website, as long as the source (author, title, publisher) was mentioned.
As of December 2008, Google had 24 library partners, including a Swiss
one (University Library of Lausanne), a French one (Lyon Municipal
Library), a Belgian one (Ghent University Library), a German one
(Bavarian State Library), two Spanish ones (National Library of
Catalonia, and University Complutense of Madrid), and a Japanese one
(Keio University Library). The U.S. partner libraries were, per
alphabetical order: Columbia University, Committee on Institutional
Cooperation (CIC), Cornell University Library, Harvard University, New
York Public Library, Oxford University, Princeton University, Stanford
University, University of California, University of Michigan,
University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, and University
of Wisconsin-Madison.
2005 > THE OPEN CONTENT ALLIANCE, A UNIVERSAL LIBRARY
[Summary] Starting with an idea from the Internet Archive, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) was launched in October 2005 as a global effort from a group of cultural, technology, non profit, and governmental organizations to build “a digital archive of global content for universal access” and offer a permanent repository of multilingual text and multimedia content. The first 100,000 ebooks were available in the Internet Archive in December 2006, with 12,000 new ebooks posted per month. Unlike Google Books, OCA books are searchable and downloadable through any web search engine, and don’t include copyrighted books, unless 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 United Kingdom, O'Reilly Media, and the Prelinger Archives. One million ebooks were available in the Internet Archive in December 2008, and two million ebooks in March 2010.
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Starting with an idea from the Internet Archive, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) was launched in October 2005 as a effort to build “a digital archive of global content for universal access”.
The goal was to offer a permanent repository of multilingual text and multimedia content. The first 100,000 ebooks were available in the Internet Archive in December 2006, with 12,000 new ebooks posted per month.
What exactly is the Internet Archive? Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle in San Francisco, California, the Internet Archive is a non- profit organization that has built an "internet library" to offer permanent access to historical collections in digital format for researchers, historians and scholars. An archive of the web has been stored every two months or so since 1996, and has been freely available through the Wayback Machine since October 2001. As "a nonprofit digital library dedicated to providing universal access to human knowledge", the Internet Archive has also become a digital library of text, audio, software, image and video content.
As explained in 2007 on the OCA website, OCA "is a collaborative effort of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that helps build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material. An archive of contributed material is available on the Internet Archive website and through Yahoo! and other search engines and sites. The OCA encourages access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors."
Unlike Google Books, OCA books are searchable and downloadable through any web search engine, and don’t include copyrighted books, unless 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 United Kingdom, O'Reilly Media, and the Prelinger Archives.