The Librarian's Legal Companion for Licensing Information Resources and Services. By Thomas A. Lipinski. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, 2013. 734 p. $130 paper (ISBN: 9781-5-5570-610-4). The Legal Advisor for Libraries, Educators, & Information Professionals. When the electronic publishing revolution launched with CD-ROM based abstract and index services (AI he seemingly cannot repeat this enough, but given the widely and wildly variant contexts in which he makes this point, the admonition does not come off as hectoring. The Librarian's Legal Companion for Licensing Information Resources and Services has much to recommend. For starters, the title signals Lipinski's acceptance that the line between databases and software is often arbitrary. Indeed, he makes clear that software has always been licensed, with licensing and copyright existing side-by-side in tension and contradiction from the first stirrings of the information technology ecosystem. For every named mention of a database platform, e.g., Cengage, there is another to a software colossus like Microsoft. As if to underscore the difficulty in unraveling software's inevitable entanglement of content, he introduces a third element, hardware in the form of the e-reader. The Kindle is sold, and under the doctrine of first-sale, libraries may lend them. But Amazon's software is licensed, restrictively. Books for the Kindle are nontransferrable. Can libraries lend Kindles even if they have not set up a complicated arrangement with OverDrive? Lipinski himself is unsure, but anyone who reads his analysis will find it less than exhaustive and illuminating. Lipinski ventures beyond the right to distribute gadgetry, boldly venturing into the property regime of the web itself. He dissects the multiplicity of terms of use (TOU) and end user license agreements (EULA) proliferating throughout the web generally. Their language binds individuals accessing web-enabled services through any library or institution of higher education, but few patrons read these agreements and fewer understand them. Fortunately, as Lipinski points out, courts have sometimes, perhaps with surprising frequency, sided with plaintiffs claiming unconscionability (148), i.e., bullying by contract. His chapter on the open source movement and the development of the Creative Commons and General Public (GNU) licenses could stand alone as an essay. This is not to suggest there is any false advertising by Lipinski or his publisher, the American Library Association; this is a legal guide, after all. But the few librarians who will approach this as narrative are likely to make it to the end only if they possess more than a layperson's grasp of US copyright statute and theory. …
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