Hi!
It's reply to original mail in Wikisource-l (but I'm not subscribed to it).
I tried to push similar project on Russian Wikiqoutes (see http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%...), but looks like Wikimedia Russia has things with bigger priorities.
I see next potential benefits for ABBYY: beta-testing, publicity, spell-checking improvements, tax deductions.
FineReader is definitely valuable for not widespread languages or variants (like old Russian orthography).
I don't think that remote OCR will works good in all cases. Sometimes it's necessary to make page options modifications. FineReader sometimes may not correctly find prose text boundaries. Also user intervention will be necessary if text contains several languages.
ABBYY has own online OCR service http://finereader.abbyyonline.com. I think from their point of view, it's much better to offer it instead of standalone software, because they could actually check if software used as intended or not as well as make accounting for tax deductions.
There are some open source OCR projects: * OpenOCR (http://en.openocr.org) - former FineReader competitor. Support looks poor, but it could OCR some languages (I tired moder Russian), likely major European ones too. * Tesseract (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr) - can't comment on it, but Google looks used it.
Eugene.