Almost everyone i've spoken to about Google's plans to scan millions of copyrighted print works and make them accessible comments on it with an air of mistrust, even outrage (depending who you're talking to). No other Search engine initiative has caused so much bad feeling, so many lawsuits and so much fear as far as i can recall. Hope springs eternal though, as Yahoo, masters of the public relations stab in the back, come out with not a proprietory system for scanning books, but an Open Content Alliance that's partnered with such groups as the Internet Archive and a whole bunch of others.

From the announcement on the Yahoo! blog

To kick this off, Internet Archive will host the material and sometimes helps with digitization, Yahoo will index the content and is also funding the digitization of an initial corpus of American literature collection that the University of California 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

It's a PR coup. With the GOOG project under increasing legal pressure and suspicion, the OCA come in with a set of principles for participation that even the most cynical would find it hard to find fault with.

It's fluffy, it's opt-in and it's non-propriatory for the most part. It's a group of participating companies, not one organization - sheesh, could you have engineered a more "feel good" solution?

Bring it on i say, this sounds much more like it!