from https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/copyright/lists...
A work must have at least a minimal amount of creativity to get copyright protection. This can pose a barrier to copyrighting compilations of facts, such as lists, directories, and databases. The information in them is not original, but they still may receive protection if the people who compiled them used some creativity in the process of selecting or arranging the information. This does not mean that the selection process must be unprecedented or bizarre, but it should not be so mechanical that it required no thought. For example, a telephone directory likely will not receive copyright protection because listing the names in alphabetical order does not show enough creativity. (The Supreme Court reviewed this situation in the main case discussing copyrights for lists and directories.)
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Many lists are similar to the telephone directory example considered by the Supreme Court. These include mailing lists, membership and subscriber lists, street addresses, and directories that list the contact information for certain groups of people, such as college alumni. In most cases, copyright will not be appropriate for these lists because they are arranged in an obvious manner. They are typically arranged alphabetically or numerically, and the people compiling the list do not choose which items to include. Moreover, a mailing list of people who made political contributions that was organized by zip code was found to lie outside the boundaries of copyright protection.
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Factory and store inventories do not receive copyright protection. They are meant to be comprehensive, so no choice is involved in compiling their content. Also, they are generally arranged in alphabetical or numerical order. Businesses may be able to protect their inventories as trade secrets instead.
This lawsuit is for tortious interference with prospective business relationships
"Plaintiff OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc (“OCLC”) brought suit against Defendants Clarivate, Plc; Clarivate Analytics (US) LLC; ProQuest, LLC; and Ex Libris (USA), Inc. Alleging that Defendants are tortiously interfering and conspiring to tortiously interfere with its contractual relationships and tortiously interfering and conspiring to tortiously interfere with its prospective business relationships. This matter is before the Court on Plaintiff’s motion for temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction, Doc. 4." from https://librarytechnology.org/docs/27467.pdf
Those are probably the most valid angles to push here. Mostly the invested time and money since they are actually quantifiable, as opposed to the people who maybe probably definitely canceled their service because of the disruption.
the information is sourced from the libraries yet worldcat holds them hostage to their data with membership fees.
OR, if they WERE copyrightable, that the copyright would belong to OCLC rather than the thousands of libraries which contributed them (generally without compensation).
It is noteable that OCLC does not really mention copyright or any copyright grounds in the lawsuit.
It really does seem to be a case of "we think we can make violating ToS a violation of this Ohio law against hacking."
As a librarian-software-engineer myself, it is sad to me how the rich ecosystem of cooperatively owned library consortia of the 20th century, which operated non-profit in interest aligned with those of their member-owners... has been largely consolidated into enormous ostensibly "non-profit" coroporations which act as if the might as well be for-profits, trying to maximize revenue from their "member" customers, and regardless of any larger mission or values their library members purportedly have.
The interesting thing here is imho that WorldCat is that WorldCat is a bibliographic database, mostly listing the collections of OCLC members, along with other information about these works. Obviously this information takes work to collect and organize, and that's what the membership fees are for. But for financial harm to come to OCLC (beyond the costs of being scraped) it seems to me that libraries would have to decide that they don't want to pay membership fees and instead use the scraped, less up-to-date version of the catalog? How likely is that to actually happen at any scale?