Yahoo and several companies including Adobe, The Internet Archive, National Archives (UK), Hewlett Packard Labs and O\’Reilly Media form the Open Content Alliance [1], which is described as \”a global consortium focused on providing open access to content while respecting the rights of copyright holders.\”
Crative Commons might play an (important?) role regarding the licensing of the provided content, as the NYT [2] writes in a recent article.
[1] http://opencontentalliance.org
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/business/03yahoo.html
