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From: shor@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Melinda Shore)
Newsgroups: news.stargate
Subject: Re: Restrictions on Stargate
Message-ID: <1290@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Mar-87 13:46:29 EST
Article-I.D.: sphinx.1290
Posted: Tue Mar 17 13:46:29 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Mar-87 00:59:59 EST
References: <103@stargate.UUCP> <998@rpics.RPI.EDU> <4470@columbia.UUCP>
Reply-To: shor@sphinx.UUCP (Melinda Shore)
Organization: University of Chicago Consternation Center
Lines: 21

[]
It's not as if this business of the company copyrighting the data
it transmits (without regard for origin) is without precedent.  About
three years ago, OCLC, a mojo humungo bibliographic utility, announced
that it was copyrighting all records added to its database after a 
certain date.  OCLC creates none of these records itself -- most are
created by the Library of Congress, and the rest are created by member
libraries who are charged a fee for entering these records into the
database.  Presumably, this was to discourage competing utilities from
building up their databases with records that were first entered into
OCLC, and to discourage libraries from downloading records to local
machines for searching so that they wouldn't have to pay to search the
OCLC database.  There was quite a bit of noise about it, but as far
as I know OCLC has never taken anyone to court for copyright violation.
I've been out of libraries for three years so I don't know what the net
effect has been, but I'd say there are some strong parallels between 
what OCLC did and the proposed copyright of articles transmitted via
Stargate.
-- 
Melinda Shore                                   ..!hao!oddjob!sphinx!shor
University of Chicago Computation Center         shor@sphinx.uchicago.edu