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Re: liability language
In my position overseeing a scientific society's publications, I have been following all the discussions on this forum with great interest, and have learned a lot from all that many of you have shared. An interesting aspect of several of these threads is that it appears many of you (though clearly not all) in the library community are successful in getting publishers to change the language in their agreements (whether it is liability language or other clauses) to be more acceptable. Given the time and effort it must take the publishers to negotiate all these modifications, I can't understand why they try to push the original language to begin with. At the American Meteorological Society we have had the good fortune to work with a terrific intellectual property lawyer who helped us draft what I believe to be one of the better online license agreements out there. Her working philosophy was to make the agreement simple and to have it reflect realistic expectations for the partnership between the AMS and the library that signs it. Specific to the liability discussion that has been going on here, the AMS agreement states the following: "This Agreement is enforceable only against and by the parties who have executed it; the Agreement neither creates nor restricts rights to third parties. AMS understands that the Subscribing Institution is unable to practically enforce the terms of the Agreement for third parties. However, AMS asks that the Subscribing Institution agree to make reasonable efforts to take appropriate action should they become aware of any misuse that would violate the terms of the Agreement and that the Subscribing Institution continue to promote an environment that does not allow for abuse of the terms of the Agreement." I must say I am baffled by publishers who push the sort of harsh language some of you have described, and would be interested in hearing from some of them on this forum as to why they feel they should. Librarians have a long history of working diligently to get patrons to comply with copyright and license provisions (including corporate librarians in my experience, so I don't see reason for distinction there), and it seems the publishers should trust the librarians to continue in these practices. Keith Seitter On Tue, 6 Jan 1998, Kimberly Parker wrote: > I recently ran across a license that provided a list of appropriate uses > of the data and included a sentence that said that the Institution signee > was liable for any violations of these appropriate uses by the Authorized > Users (previously defined in the contract). > ... deleted text ... ---------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Keith L. Seitter phone: 617-227-2426 ext. 220 Associate Executive Director fax: 617-742-8718 American Meterological Society e-mail: kseitter@ametsoc.org 45 Beacon Street Boston, MA 02108-3693 http://www.ametsoc.org/AMS ----------------------------------------------------------------
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