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Re: mining and rights

I have myself seen (and negotiated) licenses that state *how* an information resource is used, though not in the area of research journals. The principle that these licenses rested upon was the infinite divisibility of copyright. Such licenses are very common in the reference area, especially for lexical products, which often are licensed to search engine companies. The licenses stipulate that the reference/lexical data could be incorporated into the search process, but that the data could not be viewable by a human. The search world is evolving rapidly, and whether the inclusion of such databases continues to add value, I do not know. IP law requires specialists, and I am not among them.

Separating "human reading" from "machine reading" may have other implications. For one, the fair use doctrine may not apply to robots, since there is no case to be made that a robot is a student. As to what is the right or wrong way to view this situation, it all depends on whether you are buying or selling.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Davis" <pmd8@cornell.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 01, 2006 7:16 PM
Subject: Re: mining and rights

I've never seen a licensing agreement that states *how* an information resource can be used. Textual analysis is use, whether it is performed by someone doing keyword searches, or by a machine doing sequence similarly matching. That said, there are some unwritten rules about what constitutes *use* and distinguishes it from *abuse*. Without understanding the intent of the user, it is impossible to distinguish systematic downloading for the purposes of textual analysis, from systematic downloading for the purposes of stealing a publisher's content. Security software cannot distinguish the intent of data mining from stealing -- they both look like systematic downloading, and most publishers are pretty quick to stop this form of use. The Spider Activity Reports from Blackwell are a good example of this.

While I think the future is wide open for new tools that enable a researcher to perform analysis on large literature collections, we may need to distinguish the counting of downloads that emanate from data mining software from ordinary human searching and browsing. A single individual using data mining software may make COUNTER usage reports essentially incomprehensible to a librarian.

--Phil Davis