What do you get when you combine a four-year-old licensing system and two possibly complementary projects to digitize substantial quantities of print information? With luck, a substantial ecommons: millions of digital items that can be used directly and as the basis for derivative works without infringing copyright. These projects should also result in full-text indexing for millions more items that won't be freely available online but can be acquired through libraries and booksellers.

If you don't know about Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/), you should. Despite misguided attacks from both ends of the copyright control spectrum ("free content" advocates worry that Creative Commons licenses allow some restrictions on reuse; a few "strict copyright" extremists claim that voluntary granting of rights without direct compensation somehow weakens copyright or that people adopting CC licenses don't understand the clearly stated implications), CC offers one of the most balanced and low-cost ways to create a pool of common econtent that can be distributed and used to build new content without constant fear of legal repercussions. Yahoo! offers an advanced search option to restrict results to those with CC licenses. There are literally millions of works currently under CC license including films, sound recordings, books, and lots of Web pages.

Unless you are generating content with quill and parchment and submit it by carrier pigeon, you've probably heard about Google Book Search, which began as a system of providing full-text indexing to current books submitted by their publishers, typically showing one or two pages in context and providing ways to order the book or find it in a library. The lesser-known Google Library Project is much larger, wider-reaching, and more controversial. The plan is to digitize the entire print collection of the University of Michigan libraries and large portions of New York Public Library and the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. All works digitized will be searchable as part of Google Book Search. Public domain works will be readable on-screen (as page images). For works still under copyright—somewhere between 63% and 80% of the combined collections of the library partners—you'd see a fragment of the page surrounding each of the first three occurrences of a term searched. In both cases, you'd find links to find the book in a local library, see if a used copy is available, and possibly buy a new copy.

Now the Google project has been joined by another ambitious plan: the Open Content Alliance (OCA), announced in October 2005 (www.opencontentalliance.org). OCA is a collaboration between Yahoo!, the Internet Archive, and a number of other organizations including the University of California, Prelinger Archives, European Archive, National Archives (UK), the University of Toronto, O'Reilly Media, HP, Adobe, and my employer, RLG. Within the first month of OCA's existence, Microsoft and more than a dozen major university libraries had joined; by the time you read this, OCA should include a substantial range of contributors and partners. (Microsoft isn't just adding its name; it's committed to paying for the digitization of 150,000 books for OCA in the first year, topping Yahoo!'s initial offer of 18,000 books—both at $0.10 per page, or an average of about $30 per book.)

OCA differs from Google Book Search in several key respects. OCA won't scan anything that's under copyright without express permission from the copyright holder. However, OCA is open—while Yahoo! is committed to indexing the contents, those contents will also be open for indexing by other Web search engines (certainly including MSN Search). OCA plans to use open methods and standard protocols wherever it can, so the metadata and content will be widely useful. PDF (I'm guessing the open archival subset of PDF, which is no longer proprietary) will be the most common way to present scanned books for viewing or downloading, which makes sense, given the desire to present the actual book, rather than just its text.

Pulling these threads together, OCA encourages use of Creative Commons licenses whenever that makes sense. That makes it more likely that a good deal of copyright material will be available under appropriate license, since Creative Commons licenses offer carefully drawn ways to "give away" some copyright control without losing copyright. Google isn't part of this combination yet, but it wouldn't take much to make the public domain works part of the greater whole.

Creative Commons takes one tack toward building a commons of econtent (and physical content). OCA uses Creative Commons and the many open standards developed to share information where it can, and works to make major resources available to all without injury to any. There will be more such projects—not to undermine the rights of writers and publishers, but to provide a commons that we can use and derive new creations from.