Licensing Digital Content: A Practical Guide for Librarians

Citation

Sturges, P. (2003), "Licensing Digital Content: A Practical Guide for Librarians", Online Information Review, Vol. 27 No. 1, pp. 64-65. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520310462626

The licensing of digital content may well be the most important current topic in practical librarianship. After centuries of developing expertise in the acquisition of books and other print materials, the modern librarian needs to make ample acquisitions of digital content to complement and maybe, eventually, to replace print. This is not an easy shift for librarians, and good guidance is at a premium. Lesley Harris’ background is in law, but she has tested her message to librarians in frequent seminars and in advice to library clients as a consultant. She explains that the chief difference between print and digital paradigms of acquisition is that print is acquired under the general provisions of copyright law. Digital content, by contrast, is acquired on the basis of specific contracts, or licences, with their own individual terms and conditions. Although Harris writes essentially for libraries as licensees, rather than licensors, she points out that her advice can also be useful when the library acts as licensor of content it owns.

Some licences are presented to libraries by the content owners as non‐negotiable – take it or leave it. In other cases there is full scope for negotiating price, number of users, range of types of access allowed, liability for the way that users handle content, and so on. In a sense, however, any licence is likely to be negotiable to some extent or other, so negotiation skills assume paramount importance. Harris advises developing a licensing needs assessment in the library as a starting point for strong, well‐focused negotiation. Any licence that is offered can then be checked against explicit criteria that have been set down in comparative leisure, rather than thought through at the last minute, if at all. Clauses that are unsatisfactory in some way can then be the subject of special discussion. Thus, for instance, a licence may seek to limit users’ fair use/fair dealing rights as provided under copyright law, or make the library responsible for abuses of the licence by users. These are matters on which Harris advises firm negotiation.

As befitting a lawyer, she is extremely informative on the language used in the licensing world, and this may be the book’s key contribution. Legal terminology can be both confusing and intimidating. For instance, although a digital licence really only grants permission to use a piece of content, this may be referred to as purchasing. This, to the layperson, sounds like outright acquisition, not merely the purchase of temporary rights. The book sets out the key clauses that might be expected in a digital licence. These include essential issues, such as the monitoring of use (with its privacy implications), and the determination of authenticated users, or the duration of the licenced rights, all explained in clear and practical form.

Harris also provides a practical guide to negotiating. This boils down to being well prepared and alert to what the other party says and does, but also contains a great deal of helpful advice. Finally, the book contains a lengthy question‐and‐answer section based on Harris’ long experience of what concerns librarians. Although her work as a copyright lawyer was mainly in Canada, and although she appends two clauses of the US copyright law, her book is not geographically limited. Licences are treated as a universal legal concept, and their negotiation as a matter of purposeful human interaction. Even though laws will change, intellectual property is likely to depend greatly on licences for many years to come, and this guarantees the usefulness of Harris’s book.