Holy cow...licensing!

I realize that I was absent from my blog last week, but no worries, I have plenty to cover today. Last spring's policy course (Information Ethics) was fascinating and overwhelming at the same time - a book a week, a crash course in copyright...overall a lot of information to take in. Now that I've been in e-resource management for four weeks, I realize how specialized and detailed all of the fields in copyright are.

Last week (9/17/10), we focused on the ProCD vs. Zeidenberg case. After reading the case, I was left somewhat confused, but had gathered the main points of the case. But it was only after hearing Anuj Desai talk about the case that the truly complicated nature of the case emerged. The buzzword of the ProCD vs. Zeidenberg case? PREEMPTION. Federal law trumps state law and state trumps local. But here is where the case gets jumbled (or one of the places): licensing agreements, or contracts, preempt copyright law. Throw in the concept of "public domain" and we have ourselves a messy case.

Here are a few of my notes from Anuj's talk and my reading:

- OVERALL, there was a conflict between the copyright statute and the licensing agreement

- Zeidenberg's point: this information is in the public domain (in absence of a contract)

- arbitrage possibilities

1. the only people who bring cases are the copyright holders

2. takes fair use out of the game

3. Obviousness of the terms of use (it must be obvious to the user, not just the library)

4. in general, licensing pricing is correlated with use

CONTU (t=technology) and CONFU (fair use)

We spent some additional time, this week and last week, going over CONTU and CONFU and examining the conference goals and outcomes. We covered several different areas in class, but my group focused on the distance learning portion of CONFU. Portions of the document didn't make much sense to me - there is difficulty in defining and creating restrictions (I guess this applies to most things when it comes to information technology). Here is what I noticed in the reading:

1. The rhetoric is designed around non-profit institutions - how does this all change once it gets into the "for-profit" area of education?

2. no asynchronous distance learning

3. must take place in a classroom (which now defeats the reason why many people choose on-line courses)

4. there was an attempt to separate dramatic from non-dramatic, but I could never figure out what that was

5. subsequent performances must have permission

and my favorite point...

6. This should be revisited in 3 - 5 years.

And now onto Licensing Day! Yay!

(quick note: this class has really made me realize that after I graduate and leave UW-Madison, I will most likely never again have access to so much information and so many databases. I'm not sure people realize how much we have until their access has been denied.)

Here are a few of the points I found most interesting about licensing:

- libraries spend an average of 250 hours per year on licensing

- the majority of legal issues that arise in licensing are with corporate and legal libraries (19%).

I don't want to spend too much time going over the minutiae of licensing, but I must admit that I found it quite dry but interesting (can I say that without sounding too contradicting?). The boring points written in fine print ultimately define the level of access. Before looking at a few example licenses, I assumed that all licenses fit a specific layout and order, but not necessarily. I often had to search under various headings to find the most important points, like usage rights, user control, enforcement clauses, etc. Some points were also split up under two different headings. Reading and interpreting these documents really do take time and certain eye for detail. There will be more on this in my licensing assignment on JSTOR...