Re: DRM at SAE Publication Board meeting

[Jim Stemper <stemp003@tc.umn.edu>]

It's great that SAE appears to be listening to the concerns of 
faculty and librarians, but I don't think we're out of the woods 
just yet...

The revised license I've seen still says that we cannot "transmit 
electronically, via e-mail or any other file transfer protocols, 
any portion of the Licensed Products." They may "technically" 
remove the DRM restriction, but doesn't this wording really 
retain the same *legal* prohibition on the practice of "scholarly 
sharing," i.e. emailing tech reports to colleagues in a work 
group?

The revised license also retains the recent prohibition on 
walk-in users, revoking a right commonly granted to land-grant 
universities in earlier iterations of the license.

Another big concern is that the "pay $X per download" pricing 
model remains -- in the absence of usage statistics from SAE, 
it's much too easy to run out of downloads in the middle of a 
budget year.

Is no one else pushing back on this stuff?

Sounds like this one needs a little more time in the oven.

Jim Stemper
Electronic Resources Librarian
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities


At 11:01 PM 4/25/2007
From: Ann Okerson

To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu Subject: DRM at SAE Publication Board meeting Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:31:33 The SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers International) access and licensing arrangements have been discussed on several lists and some of you have seen those messages, along with the voluble protests from the library community. Our Engineering Librarian forwarded me today the message below, which signals that librarians can have an impact on problematic publisher licenses; And that publishers do listen. Ann Okerson [SNIP]