@dsalo@digipres.club oh interesting, what leads you to root against OCLC here? is it that they themselves have an effective monopoly within the cataloguing market, and claim rights over the work product of their subscribers? (as someone without much context for it, i felt like the complaint made a strong case that clarivate is making an anti-competitive play here, even if some of the underlying IP stuff on OCLC's end might be gross, so i'm curious)

@cascode It's the effective monopoly, yeah, along with OCLC really needing to lose its nonprofit status because it acts like a for-profit in every way that matters. (There's an ICOLC report that makes a huge case for this.)

OCLC has sued other record-sharing cooperatives out of existence before. It's gross. MARC records are supposed to be shareable and shared!

I have ZERO love for Clarivate/ExLibris. But OCLC needs to have its snout knocked out of the trough.

@dsalo @cascode Thanks for the hint about that ICOLC report, Dorothea. For anyone interested in reading it, it can be accessed here: https://bluesyemre.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/report-of-the-icolc-oclc-task-force.pdf

Having skimmed over it, it looks like a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what kind of beast OCLC is.

@dsalo
Re. "OCLC has sued other record-sharing cooperatives out of existence before."

Could you give me a pointer to those cases, Dorothea? SkyRiver and biblios.net come to mind and OCLC definitely acted to prevent this competition but AFAIK OCLC didn't sue any of these.
@cascode

@acka47 @cascode Yes, I overclaimed. "Threatened" is fair.

@dsalo @cascode Brings to mind the heady days of 2008 when OCLC tried to lock down "their" bib data: https://coffeecode.net/archive-of-oclc-worldcat-policy-as-posted-2008-11-02.html

@dsalo @cascode

(14 years later it looks like the only still-working link in that post is to the archived policy, ah link rot)

@dbs @cascode Yeah. OCLC has always been crap.

@dsalo Did OCLC just run through the file of complaints about themselves and do a find and replace? I hope this drags on for years and costs them both a lot of lawyers.

@hugh Given what I've seen from Skippy the Whitest Dude, I could believe it.

I hope Clarivate wins quickly and completely. Sure, it'd be fun to hit OCLC in the lawyer wallet... but hitting them HARD in the WorldCat wallet is the more damaging-to-them long-term play.

@dsalo @hugh

TIL