[Taxacom] BHL and print on demand publishers

Sat Mar 31 17:40:30 CDT 2012

PS: Otherwise, where are the limits on what the publisher/author can demand. You may download the PDF free of charge from our site, but only if you buy Pepsi rather than Coke, vote for Obama instead of whoever, etc., etc.

Or, a site could force you to navigate through several pages, each containing commercial advertisements and/or political propaganda, to reach a free PDF, prohibiting the use of the direct URLs to the PDFs ...

Where do you draw the line??

________________________________
From: Roderic Page <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>
To: taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
Cc: Martin Kalfatovic <KalfatovicM at si.edu>; Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> 
Sent: Saturday, 31 March 2012 9:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] BHL and print on demand publishers

Dear Stephen,

I suspect BHL will be able to answer this better than I can, but there's a big difference between "free" as in "beer" and "free" as in "liberty."

Copyright essentially means the creator of a work gets to decide what you can do with it. That may, in the case of the GPL license used by Mediawiki (for example) to place no commercial limitations on what you do with the work (with the proviso that if you do use it you must make your own work available under the same license, i.e., make the source code available). GPL is based on copyright and is legally enforceable, but it's not about money, it's about not restricting people's freedom to build on the work of others. 

I'm guessing that the noncommercial restriction in BHL is there to placate the providers of the literature being scanned. Providers are presumably fearful that by making their content openly available someone will make a money, not the provider (whether this is a legitimate fear is another question).

There's been a lot of discussion about the wisdom of apply non-commercial restrictions to biodiversity data (and data in general), see for example "Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information" http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.150.2189 . What counts as "non-commercial" is not obvious, and may exclude some activities that are not, on the face of it, commercial (e.g., a field course that charges to recoup its costs).

Copyright is also messy because once you start to aggregate data it's not always clear what happens to copyright, who really has the authority to claim copyright (BHL has page scans that state the original copyright of the printed material, how do I determine which copyright [the original or BHL's] applies if I want to aggregate that content?). Aggregations themselves may be copyrighted, even if the data isn't, and so on. I gather that in the commercial world there are companies whose business model is simply to provide content where all such issues have been resolved.

Copyright is complicated and messy, and full of unintended consequences. The distinction between "free beer" and "freedom" probably doesn't matter to most users, if it's freely available it's free (I want to read this article now!). It makes a big difference, however, to the kinds of resources users can expect to see created by developers. If you are reusing or repurposing content then licensing becomes a big deal.  Many publishers are blissfully unaware of these issues as well, and claim they are "open access" when they either implicitly or explicitly don't allow you to repurpose their output.

Personally I'm not at all against commercial use, and I suspect in the long term preventing commercial use is short sighted. This field could benefit from some commercialisation, and the energy brought by startup companies with bright ideas. I'd pay money for a decent app to display BHL content on an iPad, for example.

Regards

Rod

On 30 Mar 2012, at 23:49, Stephen Thorpe wrote:

> Hi Martin,
> I find your comments interesting. I, for one, find BHL extremely useful, and I use it all the time (though I don't see any significant advantage, for me, over accessing the same content on Internet Archive). You say [quote]at the same time, we have discouraged 3rd party commercial use of the digitized content without permission from the copyright holders[unquote]. I am a little confused as to the exact meaning of this, and whether it is enforceable legally? Or are your letters of protest to Nabu all just hot air?  I'm a simple guy, with a simple brain, but I just can't get my head around this simple issue: 
> If you are giving a publication away, free of charge, to anyone who wants one, then why do you care if they put it to some commercial use? Not only that, but why does the original publisher ("copyright holder") care? Note that selling copies is only the most obvious commercial use, but there are potentially many other, more subtle, "commercial uses", such as obtaining information (such as research findings) to help to develop a new product. Copyright is typically an issue relating to financial losses to the copyright holder resulting from other people copying the work without permission. But if you are making it freely available to everyone anyway, then there are no overt financial losses to BHL or the copyright holder. Perhaps, strictly speaking BHL doesn't want a monopoly for itself, but rather a monopoly for itself and its chosen partners, where there is presumably some sort of direct or indirect mutual financial gain in the partnership? Probably a
> perfectly legal and legitimate arrangement, I'm sure.  I am interested ... how does it work??
> Cheers,
> Stephen
> 
> From: "Kalfatovic, Martin" <KalfatovicM at si.edu>
> To: "'taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu'" <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
> Cc: "'biodiversitylibrary at gmail.com'" <biodiversitylibrary at gmail.com> 
> Sent: Saturday, 31 March 2012 5:21 AM
> Subject: [Taxacom] BHL and print on demand publishers
> 
> Dear Taxacom members:
> 
> I want to thank you all for your participation on the discussion around the discovery that print on demand publishers, specifically, Nabu Press, have been using BHL digitized materials for commercial purposes.
> 
> BHL has worked closely with scientific societies and publishers for permission to digitize and make available via BHL (and the Internet Archive, our scanning partner) in a free and open manner. At the same time, we have discouraged 3rd party commercial use of the digitized content without permission from the copyright holders.
> 
> Generally, this is in the spirit of a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) license.
> 
> In looking specifically into the Nabu Press issue, BHL staff have found that we've had some erroneous metadata in the rights field that indicated "NOT IN COPYRIGHT". We believe this has led to Nabu scooping this content. We are working now to correct this problem and will work with Nabu, Amazon, etc. to remove the copyrighted materials from commercial sites. It is also possible that Nabu and other POD publishers have scooped content with appropriate metadata, we will also investigate that.
> 
> I also wanted to address a couple of points that have come up in the discussion, specifically, "BHL would no doubt like to have a monopoly on providing access to the publications it has (even though the access is free, it can still make money indirectly)". BHL does not seek a monopoly on access to taxonomic literature. Our mission and mandate has been provide ease of access to as much content as possible. This is why content is available through both the BHL site as well as the Internet Archive (and its associated site, OpenLibrary.org). We hope that the BHL portal provides the tools and services to make the content more findable and usable there (through APIs, web services, etc.) but hope that the community doesn't feel that we're enclosing the content in just a different way.
> 
> Again, our apologies to rights holders who entrusted their content to BHL in good faith agreements. Be assured we will revise our workflow to make certain that our digitization work will reflect the parameters  given to BHL by the rights holders.
> 
> Martin Kalfatovic
> BHL Program Director
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Martin R. Kalfatovic
> Associate Director, Digital Services Division || Program Director, Biodiversity Heritage Library
> Smithsonian Institution Libraries
> 10th Street & Constitution Ave., NW
> Room 24 Mz
> MRC 154 PO Box 37012
> Washington, DC 20013-7012
> email: kalfatovicm at si.edu<mailto:kalfatovicm at si.edu>
> tel: 202.633.1705
> twitter.com/silibraries | smithsonianlibraries.si.edu | research.si.edu | biodiversitylibrary.org
> Help save trees by printing only what you need.
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 
> Taxacom Mailing List
> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
> 
> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these methods:
> 
> (1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org
> 
> (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
> _______________________________________________
> 
> Taxacom Mailing List
> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
> 
> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these methods:
> 
> (1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org
> 
> (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
> 

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
Skype: rdmpage
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html