RE: Additional detail on MIT and Hoovers

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

I think that if I were negotiating this contract, I'd insist on 
changes to this sentence:

> If such monitoring indicates you are not in compliance with 
> this Agreement or if fraudulent activity is suspected, 
> Hoover's, Inc. reserves the right to take such action as it 
> deems necessary, including, but not limited to, assessing 
> additional charges for users or downloaded records in excess of 
> the number authorized, or suspension or termination of the 
> account.

The kind of monitoring Hoover's describes here wouldn't bother 
me, but the remedy language is unacceptably open-ended.  One 
major purpose of a license agreement is to define 1) what 
constitutes a breach of its terms, and 2) what actions are 
mutually acceptable in the event of a breach.  What you've got 
here is a license that says "Hoover's can do anything it wants in 
the event that it feels a breach has taken place," and that's 
ridiculous.  Hoover's needs to say 1) what constitutes a breach 
(i.e., what level of downloading will they take as evidence of 
abuse) and 2) exactly what it plans to do if that happens: are 
they going to disable the offending IP address, or disable your 
whole campus's access, or charge you extra (and if so, how much 
and by what mechanism?), etc.  As it stands, this sentence says 
Hoover's will decide whether a breach has happened and will 
decide how much to penalize you for it.  Signing this license 
would be like signing a blank check made out to Hoover's.

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand@unr.edu