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Re: Column on licenses

Some clarifications and comments.

No publisher I know of, including OECD, Springer, or Elsevier, has the kind of license I envisioned. Our (Shatzkin's and my) proposal was not for ebooks, which are likely always to be sold with licenses (more below), but as an option for someone who purchased hardcopy. I hasten to add that we are NOT saying that hardcopy should be licensed. We are proposing that anyone who purchases a hardcopy automatically gets an OPTION for an electronic license, whose terms would be set by the publisher. We also propose that those terms be progressive, but not every publisher will agree to this. If such licenses were in place, there would be no lawsuits against Google, provided that the terms of the licenses covered sufficient territory.

It should be noted that not all, indeed few, publishers have the luxury of OECD in walking away from their hardcopy businesses. Books for the research community are the exception; the rule can be found in Borders and Barnes & Noble. The riches--in hardcopy--of the modern American bookstore, not to mention what can be found at Amazon and its online competitors, are by my estimate about 8 times greater than what was available 20 years ago (from an average of 12,000 titles in a retail store to 100,000). There is little demand for making these titles available electronically, though I for one believe that that is just about to change.

As for the horror of licenses, I suppose we all have to choose our monsters. I would prefer a multiplicity of licenses to one lawsuit. In the absence of licenses, we have litigation. And this promises to get uglier. Google, for instance, has subpoenaed Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon as part of its defense against the publishers' (and the Authors Guild's) lawsuits. Why? Will the publishers turn around and sue the University of Wisconsin? Where does it end? There may be some members of this list who do not know what it means to be dragged through civil litigation--the waste, the falsehoods, the routine abuse of the people who get swept into it.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: <Toby.GREEN@oecd.org>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 4:11 PM
Subject: RE: Column on licenses

Joe,

Thanks for alerting us to your piece in Publishers' Weekly. You
say that you know of no publisher with a clear policy on how
libraries can use e-books. I find this a challenging statement
because I would be surprised if Springer and Elsevier did't have
one. However, I do know this - we have one. We post some Terms
and Conditions for using our e-library on our website (you can
find the link at the bottom of every page.) We issued this in
2004 and so far, we're finding no problems at all with it and
neither do our growing number of customers.

I agree with Kevin Smith about the horror that would entail if
every publisher issued a formal license with their books. This is
why we do our utmost NOT to sign licenses with our customers,
relying instead on our Terms and Conditions, trust and existing
copyright laws to prevent widespread abuse (we realise that some
level of abuse will occur whatever we do!). Some customers,
usually, I have to say, in the US, insist on having a license. We
think this is an administratively expensive way to work together.
After all, we never signed licenses when we sold printed books to
librarians - so what's different now? Sure, it's easier and
cheaper for someone to do illegal copying of copyright material
from an e-book - but signing a license won't change that!

Your conclusion, as ever, is spot-on. Many book publishers do
need to get beyond worrying about their print business and start
experimenting with new marketing channels (but don't always
expect miracles, all our books are on Google's Books service and
we're getting great visibility but precious few sales so far). We
stopped worrying about our print business in 1998 and haven't
looked back - two-thirds of our books revenues this year will
come from 'e'. (Traditionalists reading this might be comforted
to know that every book we publish is also available in print as
well.) If anyone wants to know how we did this, I'll be telling
our story at an ALPSP seminar on November 6th in London, UK, and
at an SSP seminar on November 14th in Washington, DC - maybe
you'd like to come along yourself?

Toby Green
Head of Dissemination and Marketing
OECD Publishing
http://www.oecd.org/Bookshop
http://www.SourceOECD.org  - our award-winning e-library
http://www.oecd.org/OECDdirect  - our new title alerting service

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Kevin L Smith
Sent: 18 October, 2006 12:32 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Column on licenses

I think the principle problem that your suggestion would create,
from a library point of view, is an unwieldy proliferation of
licenses.  It is already the case that libraries are hard pressed
to keep track of the various terms in licenses for electronic
databases; licenses for monographs would increase this difficulty
exponentially.

That sad truth is that copyright acts as a kind of default set of
rules that librarians more or less know and that prevent most of
us from putting current monographic literature online, absent the
intervention of Google and its deep pockets.  I don't think
publishers' licenses for monographs would really change that
situation, since the variety of terms and the lack of expert
staff to manage the resultant morass would prevent libraries from
actually exploiting those licenses that might offer the
opportunity.

If the goal is to make current monographic literature easier to
provide in digital form, how about a compulsory licensing scheme?
It would have the advantage of a known set of terms that would be
manageable, and would allow libraries to chose those disciplines
in which they want to invest resources toward online access.

Kevin L. Smith, J.D.
Scholarly Communications Officer
Perkins Library, Duke University
Durham, NC  27708
kevin.l.smith@duke.edu


"Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
Sent by: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
10/16/2006 09:15 PM
Subject:  Column on licenses

I recently published a column with my partner Mike Shatzkin in
Publishers Weekly.  The topic is the need for publishers to craft
end-user licenses with every product they ship, including
hardcopy books, as a means to make litigation unnecessary.  Here
is the link:

http://publishersweekly.com/article/CA6378889.html?display=community&industry
=Soapbox&verticalid=792

If that link gets broken, go to http://publishersweekly.com and
search for the "Soapbox" feature.

I would appreciate hearing online or off from members of the
library community as to how to improve the position Mike and I
are taking in this column.  We talk to publishers all the time;
once in a while they actually listen to us.

Thank you.

Joe Esposito