[okfn-discuss] Library Record Copyright

Thu Nov 13 14:55:10 GMT 2008

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 11:42 AM, Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:
> "Not satisfied with controlling the world's largest source of book
> information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It's
> now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give the copyright
> to all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries
> to put an OCLC copyright notice on every book record in their catalog.
> It wants to own every library."
>
> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/oclcscam

Thanks for posting this Rob. This is a major deal, though to be
expected: in chatting with libraries over the last couple of years
about whether they catalogue data could be made more openly available
a frequent response has been that  OCLC may well already 'own' part of
it so it wouldn't be up to them ...

An early look at the new OCLC terms from a librarian's point of view
can be found at:

<http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/574>
<http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/582> (revised versions)

An irony here is that the new WorldCat terms don't seem much worse
than the old ones -- at least from an openness point of view. Earlier
discussion of open biblio data is on:

  <http://blog.okfn.org/2008/03/06/open-bibliographic-data-the-state-of-play/>

There's also a CKAN page for OCLC which details its (current)
policy/license (and why it's not open):

  <http://www.ckan.net/package/read/oclc>

Regards,

Rufus

PS: if anyone is interested we're still working to get open catalogue
data on sound recordings and put it up online. In particular we have
got a load of data from BBC archives that we need help with parsing
...