Peter Suber Gavin Baker summarized the issue nicely:

There’s been a dust-up lately over a policy change announced by the Online Computer Library Center for the terms of use for WorldCat, the union catalog of bibliographic records contributed by OCLC member libraries.

It’s disputed whether OCLC provides [Open Access] to the full WorldCat data: Open Library’s Aaron Swartz says it doesn’t; OCLC’s Karen Calhoun says it does.

The new Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records supercedes the earlier Guidelines for the Use and Transfer of OCLC-Derived Records, last revised in the pre-Web era. (Karen Coyle points out that the Guidelines were themselves a response to an earlier attempt by OCLC to claim copyright in WorldCat records. The new policy avoids the term copyright, but does make an oblique reference to “the intellectual property rights [in WorldCat or WorldCat Records]“.) The new policy is slated to go into effect in February 2009.

Aside from the name change (from “guidelines” to “policy”, implying enforceability), key points of the new policy include prohibitions on commercial or “unreasonable” use. (An earlier version of the policy also required attribution to OCLC in each record re-used; in the latest version, the attribution requirement has been weakened to a recommendation.)

The dust-up arose because OCLC’s new policy for use of WorldCat records seems to restrict what people can do with OCLC’s records, in ways that the old guidelines hinted at but didn’t actually do. Though it sounds like this was not OCLC’s intention (more on that in a moment) the new policy, if taken literally, prohibits uses that many libraries and organizations are already making of OCLC records, and blocks potential uses that could have been opened up by a more liberal policy.

A couple of people have asked me to write about the brouhaha from a copyright perspective, but this isn’t a copyright issue at all. Like many of the challenges facing libraries in the digital age, the problem isn’t copyright, it’s license agreements; in this case, the agreement between OCLC and the libraries that participate in WorldCat.

Most of the elements that make up a WorldCat record – metadata that includes information on author, title, and year of publication – are not copyrightable. They’re facts. Indeed, much of what makes OCLC’s purported attempt to control WorldCat records so objectionable is that not only are the records uncopyrightable, but even if they were, the copyright would belong to the libraries that created the records. OCLC does not produce the records in WorldCat, it merely ingests them from member libraries. For OCLC to claim copyright or any other kind of ownership over those records offends the sensibilities of the librarians who create the records that make up the catalog and who pay a lot of money to participate in the system, and it worries the librarians and others who depend on the catalog as a shared source of quality metadata. When OCLC took it even further, and used the policy to place extensive license restrictions on the kinds of uses that members can make of the records – limiting acceptable activities not just to non-commercial uses but to “reasonable” non-commercial uses – that was the last straw.

The irony here is that OCLC’s stated goal was to expand sharing and re-use of WorldCat records, and my sense is that this really is what they tried to do. OCLC Vice President Karen Calhoun’s discussion of Creative Commons, and OCLC’s “human readable”-esque summary that is a direct nod to CC licenses, suggest that this policy was created as a good faith effort to clarify the terms of use in a way that would improve members’ ability to use and share WorldCat records. In both public and private statements, people at OCLC have said that the policy isn’t intended to prohibit the kinds of non-profit record sharing that libraries traditionally engage in. In a podcast interview on Talking with Talis, Karen Calhoun said that the old guidelines were terribly out of date and overly restrictive, and that the aim in creating a new policy was to reduce confusion about the many ways that people could use WorldCat records by clarifying and modernizing the language of the policy.

So how did OCLC get it so wrong? How did they end up with a policy that is so very un 2.0, so very unsharing? A policy that has librarians all over the web questioning its motives and its non-profit status? Terry Reese frames it in terms of power hungry monopolies, but I think it comes down to fear. The same fear that has publishers begging for interoperable DRM for e-books, the same fear that has music and movie companies continuing to sue their fans despite growing resistance. It’s the fear that the old business models don’t work anymore, and that the old businesses will die. OCLC likes the idea of Creative Commons licensing, likes the idea of open data, but what OCLC likes even more is survival. OCLC wants to embrace the librarianish ethos of sharing, but only if that sharing does not in any way threaten its revenue stream. This is the policy of an organization that is trying to protect its market share by restricting access to its content, instead of protecting its market share by providing products and services that are better than everyone else’s. Sure, there are overtones of monopoly, but OCLC’s monopoly on catalog data is fragile at best and its leaders know that. Rather, this is about resisting the dramatic changes that a web-based business model would require. One in which OCLC isn’t the only place to access catalog data, it’s the best place.

Additional readings (only includes material not linked in the post itself)

• Stefano’s Linotype: Rule #1 for Surviving Paradigm Shifts: Don’t S**t Where You Eat
• Libology Blog: OCLC WorldCat is the Tiger, not the Lady?
• Code4Lib Wiki: OCLC Policy Change
• Raw Thought: Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab
• blog.ecorrado.us: OCLC’s new Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records
• Rob Styles: OCLC Record Usage, Copyright, Contracts, and the Law

Hat tip to Jake Glenn for first telling me about the story and passing on many useful links.

From the press release:

The WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry is a community working together to build a union catalog of copyright evidence based on WorldCat, which contains more than 100 million bibliographic records describing items held in thousands of libraries worldwide. In addition to the WorldCat metadata, the Copyright Evidence Registry uses other data contributed by libraries and other organizations…

“Having a practical registry of copyright evidence is vital to our objective of providing our scholars and students with more digital content, one goal of Stanford’s mass digitization projects,” said Catherine Tierney, Associate University Librarian for Technical Services, Stanford University. “By leveraging the value of its massive database, OCLC is in a unique position to champion cooperative efforts to collect evidence crucial to determining copyright status.”

It’s good that OCLC is creating a copyright status registry. A well-populated registry, by and for librarians, with good and useful metadata, could eventually save users real time and money. Currently, we have a handful of institutions doing major digitization projects that are separately investigating copyright status on a large scale. It’s inefficient, with lots duplicated effort. Copyright evidence is exactly the kind of thing on which libraries can and should be collaborating, and OCLC seems like a logical organization to take the lead.

I do have a couple of questions/concerns.

1. OCLC claims and enforces copyrights in its bibliographic records. While it grants member libraries permission to make broad use of those records, my understanding is that the same is not true for non-members. If OCLC extends that policy to the Copyright Evidence Registry, it risks becoming just another walled garden that is useful only to a select (and paying) group of members, and less useful even to that group than it would be if it were truly open.
2. Right now the registry is sparsely populated. It will take a critical mass of records and contributors to become a trustworthy source of copyright evidence. Where will that critical mass come from? What is OCLC doing to build it quickly? How will users know when the registry has reached it?

Via Digital Koans.