RE: Confidentiality clause is back in at Nature

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

I'm going to put this a little more bluntly:

A confidentiality clause either means

1. the vendor is trying to put one over on you, (by which I mean 
charging you a price higher than would be tenable in an open 
market) or

2. He wants you to think he's done that with the other customers, 
but is giving you a bargain.

These clauses may prevent Rick and I from telling which is the 
case, but they also prevent the vendor from proving that they are 
making a fair offer. It is a trap of their own making: if they 
act like proverbial confidence men, they may convince us, and the 
net result is that no alert customer will believe anything they 
may say about pricing. There is a business advantage in being 
known for honest and open dealing.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Rick Anderson <rickand@unr.edu>
Date: Tuesday, October 3, 2006 1:17 am
Subject: RE: Confidentiality clause is back in at Nature
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

>> Strongly disagree with Rick's premise. Using his examples
>>
>> 1. Automotive- Not relevant. It's not what you telling me what
>> you paid for the car. It's whether the dealer will tell you
>> what he sold the identical car for, to the last customer. Try
>> to get that number.
>
> The context of this discussion is confidentiality clauses.  No
> automotive dealer (that I'm aware of, anyway) will ever make you
> sign a confidentiality agreement, forbidding you to discuss what
> you paid for the car he sold you.  I may not have much luck
> getting _him_ to tell me what you paid, but there's nothing to
> stop _you_ from telling me what you paid.
>
>> 2 Bookselling. Not at all easy to know. Yes easy to get the
>> list price. But most publishers' discount schedules, to
>> libraries, to consumers, to consortia, for multi-copy sales,
>> vary all over the place.
>
> Again, you're right that the prices vary.  But it's very easy to
> find out what any particular library's or consortium's discount
> structure is -- all you have to do is call up the librarian and
> ask.  (Unless they've agreed to a confidentiality clause.)
>
> My response to each of your other examples is the same: in none
> of the industries or markets that I cited is it common for
> pricing to be kept contractually confidential.  In many of them,
> at least the list price for the product is easily and publicly
> available -- special deals may have taken place in particular
> instances, but they're rarely (if ever) protecting by vows of
> silence.
>
> ----
> Rick Anderson
> Dir. of Resource Acquisition
> University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
> rickand@unr.edu