NEWS ANALYSIS: ITEM

			Open Sandbox: The Open Content Alliance Forges the Ultimate Content Collection
			John Blossom
			3 October 2005
SUMMARY:			If there's one thing that Yahoo! knows how to do it's building effective partnerships with media players. The announcement of the Yahoo!-sponsored Open Content Alliance that aims to counter Google's library scanning efforts underscores that it pays to play nicely with some of today's leading content archivists. The OCA has openness, voluntary participation by publishers and a global set of participants on its side to help to accelerate its efforts. But as powerful as its proposition may be there are many consortia that have fallen by the wayside as others with fewer vested interests to negotiate sped along. Google may have a "sandbox bully" image to contend with at the moment but there's nothing to say who's really going to build the better sandcastle.

If you had to sum up Google's shortcomings succinctly it would probably come down to that phrase that parents of young school children dread to see on a report card: "Doesn't play well with others." Google's pre-emptive efforts to scan both copyrighted and non-copyrighted materials from libraries for online use are but a recent example of an approach to publishers that has required Google to apply a good amount of post-facto polish to a "sandbox bully" image. No small surprise, then, that there are so many smiling faces surrounding Yahoo!'s announcement of the Open Content Alliance, a new consortium comprised of leading online archives, technology companies and libraries offering an alternative approach to Google's scanning efforts. After all, when you have the likes of Internet Archive  co-founder Brewster Kale and the University of California's Daniel Greenstein in your corner, you're  opening the sandbox to some of the most respected people focusing on what a content archive should be in an open Web world.

The OCA is focusing on building an attractive framework for building an open archive of public-domain and (eventually) copyrighted content that will encourage content to be used and reused in both new and traditional channels. Brewster Kahle's guest entry on Yahoo!'s search weblog covers the thrust of the OCA succinctly: "The rights issues come in many flavors, but our guiding principle is to offer high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of the public domain....In-copyright issues remain, but at least we can get substantial work going on the public domain."  This open approach combined with allowing its contributors tight control over the own terms and conditions of content use is likely to encourage participation in the project by libraries and publishers. As noted in their call for participation on the OCA Web site, though, this project is as much about infrastructure as it is about content. The OCA also aims to attract content tool providers that are willing to add value on top of the publicly available content. What we're seeing in OCA is an important step forward in The New Aggregation, in which archiving is going to become a powerful business model in and of itself detached from and independent of other elements of the content services model.

The OCA model encourages content producers to detach from  proprietary archiving and storage and to focus on how their content can take advantage of more open methods of content storage and retrieval. Here are some quick thoughts as to what OCA may - and may not - mean to content producers in the short and long term:

• Let the objects reign. In the emerging OCA model the openness of access and the relative openness of contributions encourages publishers to spend less time trying to control access to databases and more time thinking about how individual content objects can be made useful to more audiences. Each individual object archived in the OCA model can be packaged in intriguing new ways - ways that can make people money if they put their minds to it. As Brewster Kahle suggests in his weblog, "If someone wants to print and bind a book and sell it on Amazon.com-- go nuts, if they want to make it into an audio book and post it on the web-- go for it." If this model of repurposing content objects can become successful for public domain content, it may encourage publishers to consider how premium content objects can be enabled similarly via while leaving the archiving and storage to others.
• Sometimes brute force is not a bad thing. Notably the only publisher identified in the initial alliance membership is O'Reilly Publishing, focusing on technology books and publications, a positive but relatively weak showing by established publishers. The ability of libraries to cherry-pick select collections for OCA may serve their individual purpose, but it also means that this may be a slowly building effort. The investment provided by Internet Archive, UC's Alexandria Project and other global archivers participating in OCA is as much in outlook as it is in infrastructure, setting the stage for "religious" battles that may also slow down consensus. And of course there are the commercial motivations of participants such as Adobe, which is trying to find itself a more ubiquitous role in electronic publishing. When one looks at these familiar factors encountered in industry consortia the unified if somewhat autocratic vision of Google's well-advanced efforts may begin to look somewhat appealing if but by virtue of its already solid progress.
• Licensing and access controls need to catch up quickly with the realities of Web access and distribution. In the same way that file sharing networks triggered sleepy media companies into a scramble for effective management of audio and video content objects so will these archiving efforts force publishers of premium text and multimedia content to consider how to design their content packaging for maximum returns when there's a good chance that their content will find a good portion of its value in someone else's repositories after its initial commercial cycle. Rights management concepts and software have advanced significantly in the past few years, but one of the most significant contributions that could be brought to OCA and Google's efforts is content packaging that can provide a more permanent solution to the problems of managing the access and use of premium content more effectively.

OCA has some of the best minds in the world working on effectively collecting and archiving content into what could prove to be an unprecedented public asset.  Score a big one for Yahoo!'s growing ability to attract content players with vested interests into a common framework that makes them feel safe. It's now up to Google to prove that it can grow past a "sandbox bully" phase of maturation into an industry partner that can work effectively with publishers and content rights owners seeking to expose its content effectively over long periods of time. In the meantime the world of content has been significantly enriched by having two energetic approaches to making more high-quality content available to audiences than ever before.

- John Blossom

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