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
> [log in to unmask]
>
>   

-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu