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CLIS Research Seminar Series

January 30, 2008 @ 10 Am
"The 1980's Downloading Crisis: The Evolution of Use Rights for Licensed Databases"

Dr. Kristin R. Eschenfelder
School of Library and Information Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Wednesday, January 30, 2008, 10-11 am
Room 2119 Hornbake Building, South Wing

Abstract

Controversy about users’ unauthorized downloading of digital materials and vendors’ retaliatory charges of piracy seem like a recent intellectual property phenomenon.  But an earlier “downloading crisis” occurred in the 1980’s when users, newly equipped with personal computers, began to download data from commercial databases like DIALOG and  Chemical Abstracts.  Database vendors feared that downloading of citations and other data into “private databases” would undermine their revenues and they initially forbade downloading - employing the rhetoric of piracy and economic harm common in today’s intellectual property disputes. But, also similar to today, many users continued to download despite vendor protests. 

Then between 1980 and the mid 1990’s a dramatic shift occurred as many database vendors began allowing, and then encouraging users to download.  What led to this shift in database vendors’ attitudes toward downloading?  The shift in publisher attitudes about downloading provides an important example of change in access and use regimes that define how a type of intellectual property can be accessed and used.  Critical examination of this case highlights how changes in regime elements such as copyright law, business models and pricing structures, technological affordances, and user needs and expectations led to the change in publisher attitudes about downloading.  It also highlights the reciprocal relationship between publishers and users in the longitudinal co-construction of use rights.  Developing analytical tools to analyze and compare past access and use regimes helps us to better understand contemporary debates about what counts as legitimate and illegitimate uses of intellectual property, and the potential effects of regimes on knowledge and cultural production.    

About the speaker

Kristin R. Eschenfelder is an Associate Professor at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. from Syracuse University School of Information Studies in 2000. Dr. Eschenfelder’s research focuses on social norms defining the legitimate or illegitimate of intellectual property and how these norms change over time. Her current projects include a national survey of cultural institutions’ employment of technologies to control access and use of digital cultural collections, critical examination of use controls employed by scholarly publishers on licensed products, investigation of the effects of use controls on teaching, learning and research, and analysis of changes to access and use norms within contemporary library licensing practices.

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