RE: Peggy Hoon on licenses

[Panyarak Ngamsritragul <panya@me.psu.ac.th>]

I have been involving library services for 2 years only.  What I 
have noticed so far about the practice here is the vendor sent 
the license to us and request us to sign the license.  Recently 
we purchase a Law database and were also sent a license.  I 
reviewed the license terms and ask them to amend only a 
definition so that it will cover what we are expecting.  The 
response from the dealer(s) is "It is a standard license used 
everywhere in the world and is amendable".  I insisted that the 
term I referred to must be amended by any means as it does not 
comply with our environment.  They finally added the description 
as an attachment to the license, but still complaint that many 
famous universities in ASEAN region are using the license with no 
problem...

I would say that this is not the first time I experience such 
situation. And I would like to read more inputs about this issue 
and found that the dicussion regarding this topic is very 
helpful.

Best regards,

Panyarak Ngamsritragul
Prince of Songkla University (Thailand)

On Wed, 23 Feb 2011, Hoon, Peggy wrote:

> I think I accidentally sent a partial message, Ann.  What I was
> trying to say, was that I am aware of and applaud the hard work
> and beautiful results of standard licenses that groups have
> developed for the benefit of all.  I use some of the terms myself
> - it's all great. I also applaud the web sites, like yours, and
> the licensing educational efforts by many groups.
>
> Having said that then, my question would be - when your library
> approaches a vendor to buy access to their product, do you send
> them your license and say this is the one we'll be using?  Is
> that what we should be doing?  If so, do the vendors go along
> with that?  Our experience is that we get sent the vendor's
> license which then requires varying amounts (sometimes large
> amounts) of time to realign the terms with our environment and
> what our users need.  I looked at another license yesterday that
> is so off I wonder if it's even the right one for academia.
>
> So - the point isn't that great licenses haven't been developed,
> but they aren't the ones coming across the table.  I would love
> to know if anyone has had success just sending back an entirely
> different license - like NERL - and had IT used as the starting
> point?
>
> Best, Peggy
>