Yahoo, the American Canon, and Google Hubris. According to the WSJ yesterday, Yahoo and the "Open Content Alliance" are joining up to scan "18,000 books identified by the University of California system as being part of the 'American Canon'." The books will be those whose copyrights have expired, so they will avoid the litigation Google has walked into by proposing to scan everything.

See the discussion on the "unofficial yahoo blog."

I can reduce to two words the point of the recent WSJ editorial that discussed the lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement: "Well, duh!" I completely agree. Buy Yahoo sell Google.