RE: DRM at SAE Publication Board meeting

["Folger, Kathleen" <kfolger@umich.edu>]

According to Randy Reichardt's blog http://stlq.info/ an 
anonymous source who attended the World Congress says SAE is 
commited to rescinding its DRM policy and to changing its 
licencing options to allow for an unrestricted number of 
downloaded papers and standards per educational site. Potentially 
this could happen within the next few weeks.  While this is good 
news, you're right that it still doesn't address some of our 
basic license concerns. There's a new guy, Tom Drozda, now 
heading up the publications program (he took over in March) so 
I'm hoping the news coming out of the World Congress is a sign 
that he understands the unique needs of SAE's academic customers 
and is going to be more reasonable about license terms.  We have 
a conference call scheduled with him soon and certainly intend 
pushing on exactly the issues you've identified.  I hope others 
are planning to do the same.

_________________________________________
Kathleen Folger, Electronic Resources Officer
University of Michigan University Library
209 Hatcher Graduate Library            Email:  kfolger@umich.edu
University of Michigan                  Phone   734.764.9375
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1205               Fax     734.764.0259
________________________________

[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Jim Stemper
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 10:19 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: DRM at SAE Publication Board meeting

It's great that SAE appears to be listening to the concerns of 
faculty and librarians, but I don't think we're out of the woods 
just yet... The revised license I've seen still says that we 
cannot "transmit electronically, via e-mail or any other file 
transfer protocols, any portion of the Licensed Products." They 
may "technically" remove the DRM restriction, but doesn't this 
wording really retain the same *legal* prohibition on the 
practice of "scholarly sharing," i.e. emailing tech reports to 
colleagues in a work group? The revised license also retains the 
recent prohibition on walk-in users, revoking a right commonly 
granted to land-grant universities in earlier iterations of the 
license. Another big concern is that the "pay $X per download" 
pricing model remains -- in the absence of usage statistics from 
SAE, it's much too easy to run out of downloads in the middle of 
a budget year. Is no one else pushing back on this stuff? Sounds 
like this one needs a little more time in the oven.

Jim Stemper Electronic Resources Librarian
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

***

At 11:01 PM 4/25/2007 From: Ann Okerson
To:  liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: DRM at SAE Publication Board meeting
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:31:33

The SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers International) access 
and licensing arrangements have been discussed on several lists 
and some of you have seen those messages, along with the voluble 
protests from the library community. Our Engineering Librarian 
forwarded me today the message below, which signals that 
librarians can have an impact on problematic publisher licenses; 
And that publishers do listen. Ann Okerson

[SNIP]