Re: Article based subscription

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

There is nothing that would mandate such an approach on the part of a
copyright owner.(see David Goodman's comments below) David describes a
what we would hope we could negotiate situation.

But there is nothing that would necessarily guarantee that even if we
"owned" a work that we would be in the same rights environment we are now.

An individual article (or copyrighted, or even copy-right claimed work) or
its "pieces" could be charged for not just for the "article" but as the
documentation in Xerox's Digital Rights Language Manual suggest, use by
the hour, with or without the right to transfer the digital work to
another "repository" or to "loan" a copy of a work for a period of time,
or perhaps limiting rights to the "next" user of an item, so that they
can't copy it, or the right to "render" the work outside the context of
the original system or format, the right to make an ephemeral copy, or the
right to limit the number of times an item may be printed, or a limit to
permit printing to certain types of printer.

An electronic version perhaps could only be printed if a particular
electronic watermark or other "ownership" stamp were "printed".

Metering for about any use imaginable is "at hand" under certain schemes,
and not only at hand, but enforceable under certain types of systems.
there is no guarantee that in the future buying a "subscription" to a
journal for what libraries consider traditional use rights would be
continued.

Perhaps a copyright holder would want to assure that the ONLY use is for
educational purposes, and mandates that any electronic device accessing,
using, or manipulating a digital copy be used only by someone intimately
associated with the academic instituiton. That is, the publisher could
through rights managment software "demand" proof that the user was a
faculty member or a student (excluding non-academic users?/) of a specific
instituiton.

The idea that we "buy" a journal or its articles is fast reaching, in the
digital arena, a point of no return."Purchase" in the digital environment
may confer few rights of use. We have seen some publishers demand (and
get) exclusion of Interlibrary loan of a printed or forwarded digital copy
of an article from the electronic environment.

Maybe journal "subscriptions" don't make sense at all in the digital
environment, where ownership rules of use can be applied to any digital
manifestation, whether it be software or "articles" or portions of
articles, or pictures.

We might well be moving into an environment where every different use is
metered, permitted, perhaps charged for, and enforced by what Xerox calls
an "SPD"  format i.e. a Self Protecting Document.

The for sale sign on a digital item may not mean 'sale" in any traditional
sense we have ever thought of. The "copyright owner" or the aggreagtor may
control exactly how the "purchaser" can use the item, or how many times it
can be used, or even how long it can be used. (this is not too far
fetched, as several newspapers now "sell" 24 hour access to their archives
or the daily version of the newspaper). It's not far down that road to
"selling" information for a specified amount of time for specified uses,
again, enforced by software.

"There are no rights in Digital Property Rights Language for actions
performed by people, such as "play for educational purposes," though this
might alternatively be approximated as "play for a user possessing a
specific, valid educator or student certificate"(p. 8 of Digital Property
Rights Language Manual and Tuorial - XML edition version 2.00--November
13, 1998) copyright, Xerox Corporation. request copies at:
http://www.contentguard.com/dprlregister.asp

Back to the beginning of David's statement..Article based subscriptions
have indeed been little discussed, at least in the library community. But
not only article based but excerpt and "defined" rights use of digital
material have been extensively discussed, apparently by the major players
in the content ownership fields, i.e. software, music, image "movies" the
association of American publishers And THEIR rules, not necessarily those
that libraries are interested in look to be enforceable by software
contraints. Once again, we already have this in DVD one time use only
"rentals" How can those be called rentals, when they actually are a one
time sale of a physical medium that can only be used "again" with repeat
payment.

Chuck Hamaker


> -----Original Message-----
> From:	David Goodman [SMTP:dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU]
> Sent:	Friday, September 10, 1999 12:34 PM
> To:	liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject:	Re: Article based subscription
> 
> The question of how individual journal articles should be priced is one
> that has been relatively little discussed.  It is well known that the
> poorest quality journals are proportionately the most expensive, because
> of the smaller demand. To what extent this would apply to individual
> articles is not clear to me, though certainly some of the publishers
> currently with the highest individual article royalties are among the ones
> that would usually be considered the lower quality ones.
> 
> However, this isnt what I was trying to say. I was trying to say that
> there should be no cutoff between deciding to subscribe to a journal, and
> deciding to buy it article by article.  We should be able to say, we will
> buy it for so much an article until we have paid as much as a subscription
> would have cost, and then it should be considered that we have subscribed
> and we need pay no more bno matter how much we use it further that year.
> This would make the payments reflect the use, not our guesses about use.
> 
> David Goodman, Princeton University
> Biology Library				 
> dgoodman@princeton.edu            
> 609-258-3235
> _____________________________
> 
> On Thu, 9 Sep 1999, Paul M. Gherman wrote:
> 
> > David Goodman makes the point that articles could be priced
> differentially
> > depending on the cost of the journal they are from. In the PEAK
> experiment
> > each library subscribed to a specific number of articles at the
> beginning
> > of the year in the same way we currently subscribe to a specific set of
> > journals. In actuality we found that all libraries over subscribed
> > purchasing more articles than their patrons used. But over time, I am
> sure
> > we would all know how to benchmark our individual campus use. Under the
> > PEAK system all articles cost the same which made administering the
> system
> > easy.
> > 
> > 
> > Paul M. Gherman