Re: Supreme Court Ruling--Copyright--New York Times v. Tasini

[John Webb <jwebb@wsu.edu>]

Hmm, I try not to have knee-jerk reactions, but when I feel one coming on, I
try to run outside the hospital zone and scream, anonymously.  I may have
missed this one, who knows.  And I'm a capitalist through and through: I
love to wheel and deal.  Two of my best boyhood friends eventually owned big
used-car businesses.

I think I was using "excuse" colloquially.  Even an informed buyer rarely
knows all of the costs that enter into a seller's price.  The science serial
price increase crisis taught us all about the impacts of currency exchange
rates, the cost of paper, and increased page counts.  When normal inflation
dropped out of the running as a factor, the good capitalists among us also
understood management's understandable desire to maximize shareholder equity
in a booming market and the ability of growing and secure cash flows to
secure the building of conglomerates.  But I think that only a truly
dedicated non-cynic would overlook the publishers' "opportunity costs":
libraries are a captive market, and the publishers had a whole menu of real
costs from which to draw to explain--or excuse--otherwise exhorbinant price
increases.

As you note, publishers and aggregators will incur increased costs to cover
their past transgressions.  We have no idea how any vendor will spread the
costs.  But if I were a vendor, I'd be tempted to raise prices as much as
the market would bear.  If that happened to exceed the costs, then Tasini
would be a wonderful excuse.  If not, then it's just a good excuse.

John Webb
Assistant Director for Collections and Systems
Washington State University Libraries
Pullman, WA 99164-5610
jwebb@wsu.edu
509-335-9133    FAX 509-335-6721
    
_____

At 06:55 AM 6/26/01 EDT, you wrote:
>
>Aggregators have contracts with publishers. If publishers do not have the
>rights to license downstream, aggregators will have to remove the content
>from their databases which will become less useful to their customers. I
>cannot see that they will be able to ask for more. It will make their
>product less attractive and will handicap their business.
>
>If publishers want to get the rights they may have to pay more but,
>leaving aside the payments, there will be a huge bureaucratic workload to
>accomplish a complete rights coverage. That costs money. Some extra costs
>will get passed on to the customer even if some can be absorbed.
>
>I am interested to learn what John Webb means by the word "excuse". Is
>this a philosophical critique of capitalism or just a knee-jerk reaction
>to a situation which is not going to help information providers at all
>(either publishers or librarians or aggregators) however fair and
>reasonable the judgement may have been
>
>Anthony Watkinson
>
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: John Webb <jwebb@wsu.edu>
>To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
>Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 3:40 AM
>Subject: Re: Supreme Court Ruling--Copyright--New York Times v. Tasini
>
>
>> Any bets that they use it as an excuse to raise prices?
>>
>> At 05:33 PM 6/25/01 EDT, you wrote:
>>
>> >FYI....wonder how this will impact journal article aggregators?
>> >
>> >Bernie Sloan