Digital library models: Fox vs. NPR
Here's an overblown quote for you:
"The question is whether the knowledge of the world will be property of a private company or open to all," Open Content Alliance founder Brewster Kahle told AFP. "Google thinks public is private."
Oh, the horrors, that Google wants to make money by digitizing the contents of the world's libraries, which are generally "public", i.e., government-owned. Never mind that that "knowledge" will be in the same place it always has been (in "public" hands), or that OCA is relying on eevul profit-driven Micro$oft and Yahoo to make their project happen, or that people's bitch with Google has been that they've been digitizing "knowledge" which is already allegedly "private".
I say, the more the merrier. There's enough public domain stuff to be digitized that a dozen companies/organizations/consortia could get involved. As business models are evolved, rights to specific holdings will get traded around, weaker players will drop out, and we'll end up with a small group of digital libraries that are extremely good at getting information into people's hands. And my bet is that the winning model will be profit-driven.
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