Yes, your right, it's the Bender case I was thinking of, which I thought
(perhaps erroneously) was the _ultimate_ resolution of the West (not
Lexis!) case. I got it all confused. Obviously I'm not a lawyer either.
But the current state of the law in the US is that page numbers are not
copyrightable, or really IP protectable at all. I'd be shocked if the
same didn't hold by analogy to OCLC numbers, as they are just integers
incrementally assigned in order of accession.
Jonathan
Simon Spero wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_jhu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Well, OCLC is just plain wrong there, if they're suggesting that. There
>>
> is nothing to stop me from manually adding an OCLC number to any record I
> want. The Lexis page number case suggests to me that I almost certainly
> have a legal right to do so in the US without OCLC's permission. (An OCLC
> number, which is just an incremental number applied in order to records as
> they are added to OCLC is _very_ much analagous to a page number, isn't
> it?).
>
> The Lexis case (West Publ’g Co. v. Mead Data Cent., Inc., 799 F.2d 1219,
> 1223 (8th Cir. 1986)<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/West_Publishing_Co._v._Mead_Data_Central,_Inc.>went
> the other way (holding that West's page numbers were copyrightable,
> because West did not report every case, and were a reflection of that
> selection process.
> That case predated Feist, and could not have survived it, since the majority
> opinion was based on sweat of the brow.
>
> The case you are probably thinking of is Bender *(Matthew Bender & Co. v.
> West Publ’g Co., 158 F.3d 693, 708 (2d Cir.
> 1998)<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Matthew_Bender_&_Co.,_Inc._v._West_Publishing_Co.>)
> , which held there was insufficient creativity to warrant copyright
> protection of West's star pagination, for reasons similar to the one you
> gave.
>
> "West concedes that the pagination of its volumes—i.e., the insertion of
> page breaks and the assignment of page numbers—is determined by an automatic
> computer program, and West does not seriously claim that there is anything
> original or creative in that process."
>
>
> Also, see footnote 9 for a line of argument that should strike many on the
> list as familiar.
>
> I am not a lawyer, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express, so I am not even
> vaguely qualified to speculate on the legal ramifications of the OCLC
> announcement.
>
> I do think that providing a high quality ILSaaS is *absolutely* the right
> strategy for OCLC; along with ILLiad** it provides for a reliable cash
> flow without depending on the existence of property rights in the data in
> worldcat. However, it may be not be wise to do so without setting up very
> high Chinese Walls separating that line business from the worldcat database,
> or preferably spinning the activity off into a separate entity (does PICA
> still exist?).
>
> Not for profit corporations are still subject to anti-trust laws (see e.g
> this recent article in the Journal of Law & Economics. Posner is second
> author. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/589704 ); were an
> antitrust suit to prevail it could entail loss of 501(c) status under Bob
> Jones vs United
> States<http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0461_0574_ZS.html>
> .
> The merger with RLG may have lessened the room for maneuver. The proposed
> guidelines may not have been evaluated from that perspective; the choice of
> forum and arbitration clauses were especially problematic.
>
> It would not be a good thing if OCLC were to be damaged in this way. If one
> of the private equity owned ILS Vendors runs into the credit wall, OCLC is
> just about the only one with the resources to be able to step in and rescue
> the customers; conversely, such a situation may prompt an action by
> bottom-feeders - remember SCO?
>
> oclc.com under Jay Jordan, oclc.org*** under Lorcan Dempsey.
>
> What Would Fred Do?
>
> Simon
>
> * Cite my shiny metal ass.
> ** next generation: Artifact Exchange Network for Enhanced Information
> Delivery?
> *** oclc.unc.edu is also available
>
>
Received on Fri Apr 24 2009 - 12:02:40 EDT