In direct competition with Google for providing an online book search tool, MSN Search is
teaming up with the
Internet Archive to scan and digitize publicly available print materials, as well as to work with copyright owners to legally scan protected materials. Whereas Google has gone it alone, Microsoft is joining an industry coalition, the Yahoo-backed
Open Content Alliance.
"With MSN Book Search, we are excited to be working with libraries worldwide to digitize and index information from the world’s printed materials, taking another step in our efforts to better answer people’s questions with trusted content from the best sources," said Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of MSN Search at Microsoft Corp. "We believe people will benefit from the ability to not just view a page, but to easily act on that data in contextually relevant ways, both online in the search experience and in the applications they are using."
By initially focusing on books in the public domain and by stressing the importance of respecting copyrights Microsoft clearly hopes to avoid similar legal issues that have recently plagued its rival Google.
The digitized content will primarily be print material that has not been copyrighted, and Microsoft will clearly respect all copyrights and work with each partner providing the information to work out mutually agreeable protections for copyrights.
Microsoft is doing something right here. While Google is still busy proving to the rest of the world that its intentions are good, Microsoft is forming new alliances to find better ways of balancing publisher and author rights with global accessibility.