Interestingly, outside the US it's somewhat more possible to claim
copyright on "factual data" than inside the US, Europe for instance has
types of IP and copyright protection for databases that the US does not.
But basically, the answer is that nobody knows for sure, not even the
lawyers.
Jonathan
Bryan Baldus wrote:
On Tuesday, September 23, 2008 4:17 PM, Nate Vack wrote:
Huh. They claim copyright of these records. I'd somehow thought:
1: The federal government can't hold copyrights
The page [1] states:
"Copyright"
"Records in the MARC Distribution Services originating with the Library of Congress
are copyrighted by the Library of Congress for use outside the United States. Subscribers
are granted copyright permission to selectively redistribute records outside the United
States; contact LC prior to any distribution."
So, in the U.S., they are not copyrightable, but outside the U.S. some
copyright claim might be justified.
2: As purely factual data, catalog records are conceptually uncopyrightable
For the most part, personally I would agree with this, at least for individual
records (though some parts of the record, like the 520 summaries, might contain
enough original creativity that could be considered copyrightable). Others
might believe otherwise, at least as it pertains to the collection of the
records as a whole--for example, OCLC's copyright claims on their database of
records.
##########################
On the Fred 2.0 records, aside from their age, I wish they were available in
MARC 21 format rather than XML with NFC encoding. When I tried to use MarcEdit
to convert the files from XML to MARC 21 (January 2007), I ran into issues with
character encodings. The files also seemed to lack header lines like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<collection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim";>
[1] <http://www.loc.gov/cds/mds.html#lcaf>
Thank you for your assistance,
Bryan Baldus
Cataloger
Quality Books Inc.
The Best of America's Independent Presses
1-800-323-4241x402
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
