Commentary, intentional and unintentional humor, and media from January 18, 2012.

This blog will be present first-time users with a warning page on January 18, 2012 — the day that many internet sites are using to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — and January 23rd, 2012 — the day before the U.S. Senate may vote on the PROTECT-IP act. DLTJ is proud to join many other sites in this demonstration of solidarity for an open, transparent internet.

Thought you heard that SOPA was dead? Or was modified to be acceptable? Or that PIPA is on the ropes? As of January 17th, these statements aren’t true:

• Representative Lamar Smith, House Judiciary Chair and sponsor of SOPA, issued a statement that said committee discussion of SOPA will continue in February.
• Although proponents have said they will remove the DNS redirection provisions, there are still dangerous and unprecedented parts of the bills.
• There are still more Senators in favor of PIPA (39) than not (16).

This legislation is bad for the health of the internet, bad for companies — those that exist now and those that would otherwise come — that make their living on the internet, and bad for the standing of the United States in the global community supporting freedom of speech and due process principles.

Looking for something to do to make your opinions known? Try one more more of these:

1. Use the Contact Congress form on the OpenCongress site to send an e-mail to your Senators or use the OpenCongress Find Your Senators and Representatives to look up their phone numbers. The Wikipedia SOPA Initiative page has some good phrasing of things to say based on your concerns. If outside the United States, use the Petition the U.S. State Department form on americancensorship.org.
2. Look into the #Rootstrikers movement. A big part of the disconnect and dysfunctional nature of public office holders is the role that campaign contributions play — or, at best, have the appearance of influence — in the public policy decision making. This certainly seems to be true for the current SOPA debate.
3. Watch the Learn to Be a Better Activist webcast on January 18th (or the recording after that day). It is a full day of talks from people who know something about making voices heard in Congress.
4. Add a banner to the bottom of your Twitter profile picture to spread the word of your opinions.
5. Read the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s list of about a dozen other things you could do.

The title of this post was updated (replacing “Display” with “Performance”) a day after it was originally published. See the update at the bottom of the post for more details.


Last week a federal district court in California decided in favor of the University of California defendants in a lawsuit brought by Ambrose Video Publishing (AVP) and the Association for Information Media and Equipment (AIME). A majority of the decision hinged around whether the plaintiffs had “standing” to bring the suit, and commentary by Kevin Smith and ARL go into more detail about that. The bit that I found interesting was reasoning by the judge that equated “public performance” rights with “streaming.” Far down in the judge’s decision was this line of reasoning:

AVP alleges that Defendants’ use of the DVDs (streaming them on the UCLA intranet) infringed on multiple exclusive rights that AVP has over the DVDs. These exclusive rights included the rights to control copying, public performance, public display, and public distribution. (Id.) Defendants argue that AVP (or “Ambrose”) does not state a claim for violation of AVP’s exclusive rights to publicly perform, publicly display, distribute, and copy under the Copyright Act because: (1) AVP granted Defendants the right to publicly perform the DVDs at issue; (2) UCLA’s streaming practice is not a “public display” under the Copyright Act;1 (3) there are no allegations that UCLA distributed copies of the DVD, as “streaming” is not distribution, and (4) any unauthorized copying was an incidental “fair use” under the Copyright Act and therefore permissible.

AVP argues that Defendants’ copying the DVD in a way that changes the format of the DVD to a digital format for use on the internet violates AVP’s rights under the copyright law. As to Defendants’ fair use argument regarding the making of unauthorized copies, Plaintiffs argue that Defendants’ use is not fair use because Defendants knew that their license was limited and did not provide for streaming (and therefore incidental uses of the streaming practice such as copying) of the DVDs.

(1) Publicly Perform

AVP concedes that it licensed Defendants to “publicly perform” the DVD. At oral argument, AVP conceded that within the scope of the right to publicly perform the DVD is Defendants’ ability to show the DVD in a classroom. Plaintiff’s basic argument is that streaming is not included in a public performance because it can be accessed outside of a classroom, and as remotely as overseas. However, Plaintiff does not dispute that in order to access the DVDs, a person must have access to the UCLA network and specifically to the DVD. The type of access that students and/or faculty may have, whether overseas or at a coffee shop, does not take the viewing of the DVD out of the educational context. The Court finds that the licensing agreement allows Defendants to put the DVD content on the UCLA internet network as part of the provision of the agreement that Defendants could “publicly perform” the DVD content, and therefore Plaintiffs have failed to state a claim of copyright infringement over their right to publicly perform the DVD.

(2) “Public Display” and “Distribution”

Plaintiffs do not specifically counter Defendants’ arguments that “streaming” is not distribution or that the Complaint lacks allegations of “public display.” The Court finds that Plaintiffs have failed to state a claim for a violation of these rights under copyright law.

(3) “Copying”

Defendants do not dispute that they did not obtain authorization from AVP before placing the DVDs’ content on the UCLA network. They argue that the copying was an incidental use of their right to publicly perform the DVDs. Incidental exercises of other lawful rights constitute non-infringing “fair use.” See perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146 (9th Cir. 2007) (holding that the creation of short-term copy to be a fair use). Here, Plaintiff AVP alleges that Defendants copied the DVD in order to be able to put it on the UCLA internet network. Because placing the DVD on the UCLA network is part of the right that Plaintiff licensed to Defendants, the copying was incidental fair use.

- Order Granting Defendant’s Motion To Dismiss, Association For Information Mediat and Equipment et al v. The Regents of The University of California et al, CV 10-9378, pp. 8-10, as captured from PACER by Internet Archive RECAP (emphasis added, legal citations removed from text)

To me, this seems to equate public performance with the right to stream. I would note that a public performance right is one that needs to be purchased/negotiated, and ownership of a physical DVD does not imply public performance rights. (This is where I take issue with the lead paragraph of the Ars Technica article covering this decision; it is not enough to have purchased the DVD — one must purchase the public performance rights as well.) Still, this is a significant decision for higher education institutions that seek to harmonize physical classroom capabilities/options with those of distance learners. Or, in other words, if it can be done in the physical classroom it can be done in the virtual classroom as well (with all of the identity and enrollment access checks in place). As the Chronicle of Higher Education quotes New York Law School associate professor James Grimmelmann as saying, “universities will have a little more breathing room for using media.”

This is, of course, not legal advice. Consult your own lawyers before using this court decision as precedent. And note that Ambrose and AIME still have the option of refiling the case subject to meeting criteria not talked about in this post.

Update

To “display” a work means to show a copy of it, either directly or by means of a film, slide, television image, or any other device or process or, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to show individual images nonsequentially.

To “perform” a work means to recite, render, play, dance, or act it, either directly or by means of any device or process or, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to show its images in any sequence or to make the sounds accompanying it audible.

- U.S. Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 101 (“Definitions”); paragraphs for display and perform

Not that these definitions really clear up anything — there is clearly a diference between “display” and “perform” for motion picture works, but the exact distinction is not significant to me. There are probably whole treatises written on the difference, but I couldn’t come up with anything quickly that I trusted that explained the difference. As Jonathan points out, more clarity here would be welcome.

Wordle of the Opinion Rejecting the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement

As a preliminary matter, I conclude that most of the [legal] factors favor approval of the settlement. The ASA [Amended Settlement Agreement] was the product of arm’s length negotiations between experienced, capable counsel, with assistance from DOJ [Department of Justice]. Further litigation would be complex, expensive, and time-consuming. Although the parties have conducted only limited discovery, the case has been pending for some years. The legal and factual issues are complex, and there is a risk that if plaintiffs were to proceed to trial, they would be unable to establish liability or prove damages. As discussed further below, substantial questions exist as to whether the case could be maintained as a class action, in its present form, through trial. In light of the attendant risks, the financial aspects of the ASA fall well within the range of reasonableness.

Only two of the [legal] factors weigh against approval of the settlement: the reaction of the class and defendant’s ability to withstand judgment. As for the latter, there is no real risk that a judgment following trial would render Google insolvent, and thus the avoidance of insolvency is not an issue. The former, however, is important. Not only are the objections great in number, some of the concerns are significant. Further, an extremely high number of class members — some 6800 — opted out. … I turn to the objections now.

An Associated Press story in the Washington Post published shortly after the opinion was release includes a comment from Google’s lawyers:

Hilary Ware, Google’s managing counsel, called the decision disappointing and said the company was considering its options.

“Like many others, we believe this agreement has the potential to open up access to millions of books that are currently hard to find in the U.S. today,” Ware said in a statement. “Regardless of the outcome, we’ll continue to work to make more of the world’s books discoverable online through Google Books and Google eBooks.”

Last year ARL’s public policy group published a flowchart of options that the case could follow. With Judge Chin’s opinion, the number of options is reduced to two: appeal (and follow a large appeal decision tree) or not (and follow a large continued litigation tree).

To follow the discussion, look for the #GBS hashtag on Twitter, and in particular follow James Grimmelmann of New York Law School on Twitter and his blog along with a project he is supervising, The Public Index and its blog. Also watch the wisdom-of-the-crowds at the paper.li #GBS hashtag newspaper, which is updated daily and aggregates the links published to #GBS tweets.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.washingtonpost.com/nyc-judge-concludes-google-book-settlement-not-fair-adequate-and-reasonable/2011/03/22/ABG2DuDB_story.html on July 13th, 2011.

Eric Morgan posted a message to the Next Generation Catalog for Libraries mailing list this morning that points to a announcement by the University of Florida library that they are now applying a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication statement to MARC records they create. Their announcement says:

Beginning March 2011, the University of Florida Smathers Libraries implemented a policy to include a Creative Commons license in all of its original cataloging records. The records are considered public domain with unrestricted downstream use for any purpose.

The following MARC 588 field (Source of Description Note) is added to new records contributed to WorldCat. It has not been added retrospectively to University of Florida original records in WorldCat.

588::|a This bibliographic record is available under a Creative Commons CC0 license. The University of Florida Libraries, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

Their announcement page also provides links to some examples from the OPAC. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the CC0 graphic and declaration.

• Latinoamericanismo : historia intelectual de una geografía inestable
• Mapa Everest de carreteras, España y Portugal
• The Song of Ceylon

The University of Florida joins University of Michigan in making original cataloging records available under CC0. To refresh your memory CC0 “Public Domain Dedication” statement (it isn’t a license!) says:

The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Now this is an interesting development because it is a kind of viral declaration of the same sort that OCLC proposed with the withdrawn draft of the record use policy. There OCLC was going to add a 996 field to all records exported from WorldCat that would say:

This would do something similar except that it would make viral the public domain declaration on records added to OCLC WorldCat. (It is probably also an oversight that the 996 field documentation is still on OCLC’s site.) Does this begin to segment WorldCat into records that can and cannot be used? Or is it redundant since some think that MARC records, as a recitation of facts, cannot be copyrighted anyway?

Thursday will be a big day in the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement: the parties to the lawsuit, along with the objectors, supporters, and friends-of-the-court, will be in the courtroom of United States District Judge Denny Chin offering oral arguments in the final settlement/fairness hearing. In his order, Judge Chin recognized 26 parties that will speak for up to five minutes each on their positions in the settlement (21 in opposition, 5 in favor). The U.S. Department of Justice will also speak at the hearing. But I think we’re all eagerly awaiting to hear what the judge himself will say about the settlement agreement.

In the lead-up to the hearing, Associate Professor James Grimmelmann at the New York Law School has continued his efforts, along with the students from the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, to make the documents and proceedings of the lawsuit accessible and understandable to non-lawyers. In the most recent court filings leading up to Thursday’s hearing are some interesting nuggets.

In his posting on the motion for attorneys fees, he notes that “counsel for the author sub-class are asking for the full $30 million in fees and reimbursement of their out-of-pocket costs.” The filing contains information about the number of hours and the billing rate for some of the lawyers working on the case. Some of the stuff is just really interesting, like one filing that included everything from 18 hours by a partner of a firm (who is also a law professor at NYU) at rate of $995/hour to an itemization of 51¢ for long distance calls by the firm related to the case. Whew!

More interesting to DLTJ readers would be Grimmelmann’s highlights of Dan Clancy’s declaration in support of the agreement. Dan Clancy is engineering director of the Google Book Search project, so he has a unique insight into the inner workings. Grimmlemann notes that Clancy states:

• To date, Google has Digitized over twelve million books, and intends to continue Digitizing books in the future.
• Google has received metadata from 48 libraries.
• Google pays approximately $2.5 million per year to license metadata from 21 commercial databases of information about books.
• Google has gathered 3.27 billion records about Books, and analyzed them to identify more than 174 million unique works.

The third bullet is interesting in that I think we can eliminate one of the “commercial databases” from the list. I can’t find it in my notes from ALA Midwinter, but I seem to recall hearing Jay Jordan (OCLC President) say something along the lines that OCLC was not receiving a monetary return from the sharing of bibliographic data with Google; the value OCLC gets for its membership comes from the links back to WorldCat from Google services. If I got this wrong, I hope someone from OCLC will call me out on it.

The last bullet is interesting, too: Google has identifying 174 million works in analyzing all of the sources of data coming into it. I tried to find some numbers in the descriptions of WorldCat to compare that to, but didn’t have any luck this evening. (There isn’t anything about statistics available on http://worldcat.org/?)

To Grimmelmann’s highlights I would add this statement that seems strangely out-of-place.

• Google has no interest in censorship. Indeed, Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Has anyone brought censorship into the discussion yet? Privacy for sure, but censorship?

Also:

• Google has developed algorithms to compare these numerous sources of metadata and identify the most accurate data about each book.

They certainly seem to have invested a lot of effort in this area. More info can be found in my summary of Kurt Groetsch’s presentation at ALA Midwinter 2010.

A popular topic coming across my radar screen is the future of reading, and more specifically the role of libraries in the future of reading. Much of commentary seems to have been inspired by the announcement of the Apple iPad device, but it isn’t necessarily limited to that. Here are three exemplars, in no particular order, followed by some of my own comments.

Joshua Kim, senior learning technologist and an adjunct in sociology at Dartmouth College, posted a commentary called Popular Nonfiction, Academic Libraries, and Audiobooks at Inside Higher Ed. Joshua does an interesting comparison of the availability of “popular nonfiction” in paper and audio book format. He took his list of 197 audiobooks from Audible and cross-referenced them with availability of paper copies in his academic library. To his delight, he found that the library had paper copies of nearly three-quarters of them. It was his second question, though, that got me thinking: “Should academic libraries supply borrowers with the book format that matches their preferences and learning styles (paper, e-paper, or audio)?”

Josh Greenberg, Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at the New York Public Library, posted an entry on his blog late last month called Books, iTunes, and rental. At the top of his post, he is “wondering about the business model for books in the iTunes Store, and whether there will be an opening for circulating (particularly public) libraries or not.” He strikes a comparison between the ability to rent self-destructing movies from iTunes and how that can be a new business model for book publishers. To bring this into the realm of libraries, he suggests we “imagine an option for an institutional iTunes account, where a given user would add a library card number to their iTunes account and their library would pick up the tab when they “rent” books (or, plausibly, even other media).”

And finally, an article at CNN/Money has a series of interviews where 10 luminaries look ahead to the business of reading (via Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress and one of the people interviewed for the article). Although Matt’s response to the question of the future business of reading was interesting, I found the response from Paul LeClerc, president and CEO of the New York Public Library, even more fascinating¹ :

So we could buy x number of copies of Catcher in the Rye as books but also through a vendor we could buy y number of copies of Catcher in the Rye as e-books or e-audio books and then let’s say we buy 50 of each, 50 hardcopy and 50 e-books. It’s like having 100 copies of the book.

In each of these, the authors are struggling to reconceptualize the role of the library in the transition from a familiar print world² to a multi-format world of text-on-paper and text-on-screen (in all of its various incarnations) and text-as-audio. The latter is certainly a more complicated, uncertain world.

I think it is time to separate the cost of the content versus the cost of the container. From a bottom-up cost calculation, doing so would recognize that it takes a certain amount of effort — paying the author and editor, plus all of the overhead involved — to create a coherent chunk of text. That is a fixed cost that is independent of how the chunk of text is distributed. To this is added the cost of the format: paper/printing/binding/shipping for the physical version, bits-on-disk/infrastructure for the electronic version, and voice-talent/audio-engineer/distribution for the audio version. If one has paid for the content creation once, shouldn’t paying for the carrier of that content — paper, electronic, audio — simply be an incremental cost? In other words, if I buy the book in paper and find I want to have it read to me, shouldn’t I then just have to pay for the voice-talent/audio-engineer/distribution costs for that particular carrier?

In some respects, I think it then becomes easier to face the prospect of serving the disparate needs and desires of patrons for various formats. To reconceptualize Paul’s scenario: the library buys 100 copies of the intellectual work known as Catcher in the Rye and chooses 50 manifestations in the paper format and 50 manifestations in e-book format. The cost of switching, say, from a PDF e-book format to an ePub e-book format is just the cost of changing carriers — no “new” content has been purchased. Same thing would hold true if the library decided to convert 20 of its 50 paper carriers into audio book carriers.

I am struggling a bit with Josh Greenberg’s notion of a library barcode tied to an institutional iTunes account. Although I’ve advocated for “Just-In-Time” acquisitions policy/system of the kind that he is proposing, it was in the context of buying items in paper that the library would keep after the patron was done with it. In other words, there would be something owned at the end. An institutional subscription to limited-duration rentals of electronic content is quite different. The institution gets nothing in the end from subsidizing the reader’s access to the electronic library. I’m not so sure I’m in favor of that. It is certainly giving me something to think about.

Footnotes

1. This paragraph is excerpted as-is from the article. There are clearly some words missing, but I think the overall concepts are understandable.
2. I’m ignoring the role of formats such as microform here because they are, for the most part, a medium that is more identical to print than it isn’t.

On Saturday morning of ALA Midwinter 2010, Dr. Jennifer Younger moderated a session on the progress of the OCLC Record Use Policy Council. The meeting started with an introduction to the reasons behind the creation of the Record Use Council, the charge of the Council from the board of trustees, and how the framing of the discussion of the policy is guided by the values and history of OCLC the cooperative. There wasn’t much new here for those that have been following the progress of the policy discussion, so I am skipping over it most of it with the exception of a few notable topics. After that, I’m focusing on the lengthy question and answer session that followed Dr. Younger’s background presentation.

Highlights of the Background Presentation

WorldCat itself is now made up of 170 million bibliographic records and 1.5 billion statements of holdings from libraries. A policy is needed to create a viable business plan for sustaining this resource.

What the policy will cover: rights and responsibilities of members that have created WorldCat — the rights of members to use elements of WorldCat and the shared responsibilities to the members of the cooperative that go along with the rights; identifying acceptable use by third parties; what are OCLC’s rights to use the records on behalf of the members; and a process for collective participation in reviewing and modifying the policy over time. It will also have a “rather robust” preamble that answers the question of why a policy is needed, what problem is the policy is trying to solve, and what it is about WorldCat that necessitates a policy.

An Aside: What’s In a Name — OCLC-the-membership and OCLC-the-stewards

The View from the Database Level

1. As a supply of bibliographic records.
2. The ability to represent library holdings — the collective collection of libraries and the capability to reveal what libraries have in places like Google Book Search.
3. Knowledge organization pieces: taking the shared contribution of libraries and makes something more from it using authority control, terminologies, the Dewey Decimal classification system, FRBR work sets, etc.

It was interesting to note a non-U.S. perspective that the council has heard regarding the value of WorldCat. While most North American libraries strongly value WorldCat as a supply of bibliographic records (copy cataloging), the national libraries outside of North America are joining because adding their records to WorldCat gives greater visibility to their holdings. So the second and third value propositions above carry more weight than the first, which is arguably the most valuable aspect for North American libraries.

The challenge the Council said it is facing is to put enough controls in place to protect the value and viability of WorldCat while allowing enough flexibility for members, non-members, and OCLC to experiment and derive new, valuable services. One of the questions the review council is grappling with is how can the Cooperative use “community norms” to ensure the responsibilities assigned to the members are followed so we govern ourselves.

In taking this database-wide view, the council has set aside issues of individual record ownership and copyright of data in records and focused on what is valuable about the collection of records as a whole to the membership. WorldCat as a whole collective is copyrighted. As explained in the follow-up discussion with members of the council, the intellectual property law surrounding WorldCat records extends across many juristictions, so the council chose to focus at the database level.

Third Parties

In licensing WorldCat data to others, OCLC-the-steward is looking for remuneration of some sort for OCLC-the-cooperative. If the business use by a non-member third party is one that will harm the value and viability of the WorldCat Network, then the policy council wants to see it governed in some way. Remuneration can be in monetary form, where that external party pays a fee for the data. Or it can be in a non-monetary form, such as the quid pro quo with the internet search engines that have WorldCat data and in return drive traffic back to local libraries through linkage on WorldCat.org. As Jay Jordan put it sucinctly, “I’ll do a contract with anyone that returns value to the cooperative. Oftentimes, that is not cash.” It was stated that there have been attempts to download the entire WorldCat database. In order to be able to legally stop that, there must be a policy in place that prohibits it.

WorldCat as Linked Data

Questions

1. In Jennifer’s introduction, she talked about not only the value of the bibliographic records but also the value of the holdings. Has the Council looked a differing policies for bibliographic information versus holdings?
2. The discussion of linked data was incomplete due to time constraints. Has there been a discussion about a differentiation of value for different types or views of data? Machine access version human-oriented access? Linked data of some portion of the bibliographic record? Is the representation of the benefit of the world in general being taken into account in drafting policy guidelines?

Late, late in the day last Friday, the principle parties in the Google Book Search case submitted a revised settlement agreement agreement to the court. This post takes a look at the changes to the settlement from a library perspective. To keep this manageable, I’m not including discussion of library-oriented elements that haven’t changed; to read more about that I recommend the ALA/ACRL/ARL paper and/or previous posts on DLTJ. I’m also not including discussion on some aspects of the legal impact of the settlement (the appropriateness of setting policy via class action, the antitrust considerations of Google’s sole license to unclaimed works, etc.); for that I encourage browsing the writings of James Grimmelmann (any posting of his prefaced with “GBS” in the title). I will link off to some of the library-oriented discussion pieces of Grimmelmann and others in this post. If you really want the in-depth view of the settlement and the surrounding discussion, visit The Public Index, a website devoted to chronicling and commenting on aspects of the settlement.

How We Got Here

The Amended Settlement

• Notice begins: Monday, December 14, 2009.
• Opt-out/objection/amicus deadline: Thursday, January 28, 2010 (45 days later).
• DOJ files its response: Thursday, February 4, 2010 (7 days later).
• Plaintiffs move for final approval: Thursday, February 11, 2010 (7 days later).
• Final fairness hearing: Thursday, February 18, 2010 (7 days later).

Described below are the changes that are likely of interest or have some effect on libraries or the library world in general (plus some really odd stuff at the end). In the case where section numbers are listed, they refer to the numbered sections of the amended settlement. Capitalized words/phrases have defined meanings in the settlement agreement or associated documents; if you are really curious, you can look them up there.

It is also important to note what hasn’t changed. The terms of institutional subscriptions in the amended settlement agreement are essentially identical¹ to the terms specified in the original agreement. ² Nor is there a change to the number of terminals granted to a higher education institution. (The number of terminals to public libraries is now more flexible; see below.)

Definition of Book

Also, in §2.2 (“Authorization of Google, Fully Participating Libraries and Cooperating Libraries”) we see the explicit exclusion of microform-format materials from inclusion in what can be scanned from libraries. Previously, microform materials were explicitly included. I wonder if the change might be because the act of microforming a book creates copyright rights for that microformed derivative. The area of rights is already so complicated, the lawyers might have been looking to trim down their troubles.

Definition of Periodical

Definition of “Institutional Consortium” Changed

Number of Public Access Terminals

Privacy

Changes to “Additional Revenue Models”

Disposition of Unclaimed Funds

In the case of the former, after six years and in every year afterwards up to 25% of the unclaimed funds from unclaimed books can be used by the Registry to attempt to locate Rightsholders (§6.3.a.i). After 10 years, the remaining funds from unclaimed books will be given to not-for-profit “entities that advance literacy, freedom of expression, and/or education” in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia.

Inclusion of Creative Commons Licenses

Tightening Up Timings

Quickies

• Rightsholders can now specify minimum and maximum pricing for the title-by-title consumer purchase option. (§4.2.c.i)
• The Pricing Algorithm is now unilaterally set by Google; it used to be based on common agreement between Google and the Registry. (§4.2.c.ii.2) There is still a way for the Registry to check up on the results of the algorithm. (§4.2.c.ii.3)
• Rightsholders can now renegotiate the 70%/30% revenue split specified in the settlement agreement. (§4.5.iii)
• The secret Right-to-Terminate Agreement (Article 16 of the old agreement) is omitted entirely in the amended agreement.

Small and Odd Stuff

Footnotes

1. with the exception of adding the word “amended” in front of “settlement agreement” and other such editorial modifications.
2. It should be noted, though, in the amended agreement between Google and the University of Michigan there are guidelines for handling disputes in the pricing of institutional subscriptions.
3. Noted by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land in his summary of the conference call.

I’ve run across a striking similarity between the bibliographic utility business and the newswire business, particularly in the area of cooperatives. Two cooperatives — OCLC on the bibliographic utility side and the Associated Press on the newswire side — have the same pattern of activity:

• both are membership organizations,
• both seek to amplify the efforts of members (bibliographic records in one case, news stories and photographs in the other),
• both are reacting to threats to content under its purview, and
• both have prominent members experimenting with new forms of content delivery and use.

I’ll admit that this comparison between OCLC and the AP is not fully formed, but it has been running around in my mind long enough that it seemed appropriate to put it here. Feel free to run with this further if you think it has merit, or tell me that I’m nuts.

Membership Organizations

Founded in 1967, OCLC Online Computer Library Center is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing the rate of rise of library costs.¹

Now, admittedly, OCLC is more than a bibliographic utility for sharing cataloging records, but, for the sake of this comparison, I’m focusing only on the cooperative cataloging part.

AP’s “About” page describes itself this way:

AP’s mission is to be the essential global news network, providing distinctive news services of the highest quality, reliability and objectivity with reports that are accurate, balanced and informed. AP operates as a not-for-profit cooperative with more than 4,000 employees working in more than 240 worldwide bureaus. AP is owned by its 1,500 U.S. daily newspaper members. They elect a board of directors that directs the cooperative.

For those of us in the library field, that probably sounds a great deal like OCLC’s mission.

Reaction to Threats

Graphic from the AP 'Protect, Point, Pay' internal report.

Members Experimenting

On the AP side, the Tribune Company group of newspapers is running an experiment this week to use as little content from the Associated Press wire service as possible. Phil Rosenthal wrote about this on the Chicago Tribune “Tower Ticker” blog, and he continues:

The trial is scheduled to be conducted almost 13 months after Tribune Co. gave the AP a required two-year warning that it might drop the news service, effective Oct. 15, 2010. Tribune Co. said at the time that it was keeping its options open while weighing what role, if any, the AP would play in its future.

During the trial, Tribune Company papers will use as little AP content as possible. The papers will supplement from other sources, including Reuters, the Washington Post, and other news providers. American Public Media’s Marketplace show had a segment last week on this experiment as well.

Conclusions

The text was modified to update a link from https://biblios.net/ to http://biblios.net/ on February 11th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. As an aside, this notion of “reducing the rate of rise of library costs” has really bothered me, especially lately. What we don’t need is a reduction in the rate of rise; arguably, what we do need is a real reduction in costs from year to year. However, commentary on this aside is probably best explored in a separate post.