Karen,
I argued similarly as you do on the OCLC community forum. (I don't
know why, but OCLC took the forum off the web so I can't link to
single comments and all existing links to it are now broken. OCLC
published a PDF document instead with all entries but without keeping
the hyperlinks in them:
http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/recorduse/policy/forum/forum.pdf) The
comment I am referring to is on page 16 of the pdf, the Record Use
Policy Council's answer is on page 17.
The OCLC Record Use Policy Council neither contradicted nor confirmed
my statements. They just highlighted the policy's "social contract"
character and refrained from taking a stand on legal questions.
I am not a lawyer but am quite sure that - legally - libraries can do
with their local data whatever they want. (For the arguments backing
this view see the mentioned forum post.) If single libraries release
their data under an open licence
(http://opendefinition.org/licenses#Data) or do other things with it
which aren't conform with the policy OCLC won't have legal grounds to
prevent that or legally proceed against it. They can only use OCLC
internal sanction mechanisms. The "worst" thing OCLC could eventually
do is exclude libraries who make "disputed use" of WorldCat records
from the OCLC club.
BTW, in the hbz (North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center) it
goes the other way round: The library center would like to make the
union catalog data public domain while single libraries think the
union catalog can't and shouldn't be published under an open licence
without their consent. So the hbz decided to only open catalog data
which has holdings from libraries who cooperate with the hbz in this
open data initiative. (BTW, recently RWTH Aachen University Library
decided to join the initiative and opened up 1.2 million more records:
http://www.bth.rwth-aachen.de/offbibdat.html) Just as in OCLC's case
it is - legally - a very difficult question who can decide over a
cooperatively created database and its content. I believe it would be
the most elegant solution to set the data free, so that anyone can
make use of it. Consequently, all legal questions would disappear, the
library community could concentrate on providing good services with
the data and the data's use would be maximized. That's without even
mentioning all the other good reasons for contributing publicly funded
data to the public domain...
Adrian
2010/6/23 Karen Coyle <lists_at_kcoyle.net>:
> Quoting "B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2_at_YAHOO.COM>:
>
>>
>> Curious to hear what NGC4LIB folks think about the new OCLC policy...
>>
>
>
> While the main thrust of the policy is the same as it always has been
> (protecting WorldCat), I am glad that OCLC clarified their stand on the
> copyright issue. That doesn't mean that I agree with their copyright
> statement, but in the past it hasn't been expressed this clearly and there
> was a lot of speculation. OCLC claims no copyright in the bibliographic
> records, but does claim copyright in WorldCat as a whole:
>
> "While, on behalf of its members, OCLC claims copyright rights in WorldCat
> as a compilation, it does not claim copyright ownership of individual
> records."
>
> It does seem that one could conclude from this statement that if OCLC can
> claim copyright in WorldCat then any library could also claim copyright in
> their bibliographic database as a whole. If so, then you could conclude that
> the libraries have the right to do what they wish with the database that
> they hold the rights to. My thinking goes like this:
>
> 1) OCLC didn't create the records, the libraries did, but OCLC can still
> copyright the database as a whole
> 2) the libraries have records in their databases, some of which they
> created, some of which were created by other libraries
> 3) therefore, using #1 and #2, the library database is to the library as
> WorldCat is to OCLC
> 4) thus, the library should be able to copyright their own database ... OR
> neither the library nor OCLC should be able to copyright the database
>
> It would be extremely interesting to see this get a legal test, because my
> musing on it is really just idle brain games.
>
> kc
>
>
>
> --
> Karen Coyle
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
>
Received on Wed Jun 23 2010 - 12:09:02 EDT