“You are talking about the fruits of our civilization and culture. You want to keep it open and certainly don’t want any company to enclose it.” That’s Doron Weber, program director of public understanding of science and technology for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, talking to the Associated Press about a perceived threat. You’d think the company behind a threat might be evil; turns out it’s the company that says “Don’t Be Evil”: Google. The Sloan Foundation yesterday announced a $1 million grant for digital copying to the Internet Archive, which is affiliated with the Open Content Alliance. The OCA, which announced more than a year ago, is a group that has been going up against Google’s plans to make digital copies of nine major libraries, claiming that Google’s approach is too restrictive. Internet vet Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, told AP, “They [Google] don’t want the books to appear in anyone else’s search engine but their own, which is a little peculiar for a company that says its mission is to make information universally accessible.” Yahoo and Microsoft, two companies with executives who tend to stifle laughs when asked about Google’s “Don’t Me Evil” motto, are both—surprise!—members of the competing consortium, even though Microsoft, like Google, won’t let its scanned books show up in search engines other than its own.
Kahle noted the inconsistency in several interviews, and it’s clear that he balances Microsoft’s continued support of the OCA with his own concern that Microsoft is going just as proprietary with its book search as Google. Nonetheless, Kahle told CNET that the Sloan grant “shows that the Open Content Alliance is viable, that there is support for public interest. We don’t have to privatize the library system.”
Those in business circles may pooh-pooh this as a kerfuffle regarding academic content that no one outside of the ivory towers reads, but the control of content is important to all aspects of digital media, including (especially?) the for-profit part. You don’t think Google and Microsoft are scanning books solely as a public service—do you?