> a section on OCLC policy, and my notes have these quotes: "Truly free data
> is rare." and "There is no such thing as free metadata." And one slide was:
> "Reality: everybody has terms and conditions" -- he listed there Amazon,
> ProQuest, AllMusic, Twitter, and said "Even Wikipedia requires attribution."
I'm preaching to the quire, but the response to this is:
1. Amazon, Proquest and Twitter are corporations. Libraries are
without exception non-profit entities, and almost all are either
government entities or receive some amount of government funds in the
pursuit of a public goal. Most of the data was created by public
servants paid by with tax dollars and cannot be legally owned, but by
a sort of alchemy and the inherited accident of standing between all
libraries, it is transformed into a saleable, restricted good and the
center of a monopoly—which none of the commercial companies are.
Pardon the hyperbole, but OCLC's theory amounts to a sort of
"extraordinary rendition" for metadata—just send it to Dublin, Ohio
and they'll do things Washington couldn't.
2. The Wikipedia flip is clever. But, of course, this would be a
different argument if OCLC were only asking for *attribution*. There
is a vast universe of such data, which is still fundamentally open for
requiring some minimal notice. In this case, there aren't good grounds
for attaching Creative Commons licenses—which is based on Copyright
law, which doesn't apply here. But few would object if OCLC just want
a link.
The real issue isn't attribution, but monopoly. Wikipedia can be
forked—it isn't a monopoly. It has never been successfully forked
because Wikipedians see the value of its coherence and feel in charge
of the institution they contribute to. Wikipedia stays together by
being responsive to its members. OCLC needs to prevent forking through
*legal* means because it can't trust its members to support it.
Best,
Tim
Received on Sun Apr 19 2009 - 18:39:42 EDT