Rob Styles on OCLC, Record Usage, Copyright, Contracts and the Law

Rob Styles has an interesting post on OCLC, Record Usage, Copyright, Contracts and the Law. While Rob is not a lawyer, he did ask James Grimmelmann, an Associate Professor at New York Law School, for his thoughts on the matter. Basically the conclusion that Rob comes up with is that the only way that OCLC can enforce any policy governing the use of WorldCat records is by contract law. He believes this because WorldCat, which is a database, is not copyright-able under U.S. law. Thus, libraries and “third parties” would have to agree to a contract in order for this policy to be enforceable. If they don’t agree, but have otherwise legally obtained the records, reverts to the default status, which is that thy have no legal protection. As Grimmelmann says, “OCLC has no contractual control over the records they get.” Rob explains this in much greater detail in his post. I think everyone that is involved with decisions (or cares about) in regards to what their library does with their bibliographic records.