Vancouver Public Library has a series this week called Speak Up: Who Owns Knowledge. I attended the session last night on copyright.
Andreas Schroeder was a speaker on the panel representing the Writers’ Union of Canada and, in particular, writers who make their living from writing. Some of those writers are concerned about the seeming conflict between their right to earn a living from their creations and users’ ideas about the right to pay little or nothing for works available online.
There was a certain amount of heated debate, which I’ll refrain from at the moment. But writers and publishers pay attention. It is no longer just Google trying to “get your horse out of the gate.” [I’m quoting a speaker from the session.]
EdinburghNews.Scotsman.com reported today that an alliance has formed between Microsoft and Yahoo! to challenge Google’s project to digitize the world’s books.
Quote: The group – the Open Content Alliance (OCA) …, unveiled earlier this month by a group of digital archivists and also backed by Hewlett-Packard and Adobe, says it has signed up more than a dozen major libraries in North America, the UK and mainland Europe.
Danielle Tiedt, general manager of Microsoft’s MSN Search, said the world’s largest software maker would fund the digital duplication of 150,000 old books over the next year.