Nathan Vack wrote:
> Also... did I somehow miss the legislation in which factual
> information (like, everything contained within xISBN) became
> copyrightable?
>
License agreements can restrict just about anything the agreement wants
to. If it's an an agreement freely entered into, you can agree to a
restriction on what you can do way beyond what copyright law would support.

But yeah, on this general topic, this stiffles a lot of things we'd want
to do with xISBN, indeed.

What options are there?
1) thingISBN, of course.

2) More interesting---OCLC's _initial_ work set grouping algorithm is
public. However, we know they've done a lot of additional work to
fine-tune the work set grouping algorithms.
(http://www.frbr.org/2007/01/16/midwinter-implementers).  Some of these
algorithms probably take advantage of all the cool data OCLC has that we
don't, okay.

But how about we start working to re-create this algorithm? "Re-create"
isn't a good word, because we aren't going to violate any NDA's, we're
going to develop/invent our own algorithm, but this one is going to be
open source, not a trade secret like OCLC's.

So we develop an algorithm on our own, and we run that algorithm on our
own data. Our own local catalog. Union catalogs. Conglomerations of
different catalogs that we do ourselves. Even reproductions of the OCLC
corpus (or significant subsets thereof) that we manage to assemble in
ways that don't violate copyright or license agreements.

And then we've got our own workset grouping service. Which is really all
xISBN is.  What is OCLC providing that is so special? Well, if what I've
just outlined above is so much work that we _can't_ pull it off, then I
guess we've got pay OCLC, and if we are willing to do so (rather than go
without the service), then I guess OCLC has correctly pegged their
market price.

But our field is not a healthy field if all research is being done by
OCLC and other vendors. We need research from other places, we need
research that produces public domain results, not proprietary trade
secrets.

Jonathan
> -Nate
>

--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu