More freely available content can only be a good thing. From the release:
The Internet Archive, Yahoo! Inc., Adobe Systems Inc., the European Archive, HP Labs, the National Archives (UK), O’Reilly Media Inc., Prelinger Archives, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, today announced the formation of the Open Content Alliance (OCA) http://opencontentalliance.org, a global consortium focused on providing open access to content while respecting the rights of copyright holders. The OCA will provide a wide range of material including cultural, historical and technological digitized print and multimedia content from libraries, archives and publishers. Content will be hosted in a single, permanent repository and complete works will be searchable and downloadable for free by anyone.
….Yahoo! will power the search engine on the OCA website and all OCA content will be made available through Yahoo! Search, further bolstering the comprehensiveness of its index. Once content is available through the OCA, any search engine will be able to index it. This takes a significant step in expanding the deep web, the millions of Web sites containing content that search engines typically cannot access, as well as advances the global sharing of knowledge.
Thank God for people like Brewster and Yahoo! for protecting the public domain. Long live OCA!
This makes Google look like a bunch of gangsters (shame on Google for taking publisher’s and author’s rights away).