The Problem...

• "Content Display Sites" — such as Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book, Google Print, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and the Open Content Alliance — wish to scan, index, make searchable, and display text and actual scanned page images of copyrighted works

• Unfortunately, there are at least four ways this could run afoul of US copyright law, allowing extraction of entire works (despite security measures)

• There is no "one size fits all" solution — how many pages people can read for free of a novel without it losing value is different than for a textbook, or short story anthology; and what's comfortable for one author doesn't work for another

• Copyright owners — the authors and publishers — legally control what pages may be viewed on-line

• However, copyright owners have had no simple mechanism to indicate how much they're okay with people reading for free of each book

...The Solution:

• COCOA allows publishers and authors to specify 'default' visibility for all their works

• COCOA then allows visibility "layers" based on type of work, author, title, up to one specific ISBN#

• COCOA allows blocking portions of a work by one of several methods (such as "make 100% visible", "block the last third of pages", "block every third page") down to specific page numbers ("block pages 215-217 of ISBN# 0123456789")

• COCOA is thus simple to use and flexible enough to indicate the precise desires of copyright owners