Register of Copyrights Ralph Oman called Sept. 29 "a happy day for authors and publishers, a happy day for the Library of Congress, library patrons and Congress."
On that day, the first CD-ROM publications were deposited for copyright under new agreements in a special ceremony at the Library. The agreements were the product of more than a year and a half of negotiations with representatives of the Information Industry Association (IIA), the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS) and the Association of American Publishers (AAP).
The appearance of CD-ROMs in the Library of Congress is not new. So far this year, 249 have been deposited for copyright. But library officials have known for some time that deposits were lagging far behind the number of CD-ROM publications on the market. According to one survey, 3,216 titles were produced in 1992. The number is expected to top 5,000 this year.
The reason publishers were not complying with the deposit requirements of the copyright law was fear: fear that once the public had access to CD-ROMs in a reading room, they would be easily duplicated, offered on computer networks and their market destroyed.
As Ralph Oman said, "CD-ROM publications are not like traditional books. They are very costly to create, but they can be easily copied in a microsecond and networked around the world."
To answer these worries, the Library and three organizations representing CD-ROM publishers have endorsed four documents. The documents establish the ground rules for access to CD-ROMs in the public reading rooms of the Library of Congress.
Two documents will be used by publishers to authorize one of two different types of access for each CD-ROM they deposit. In the first agreement, called the central file server agreement, the publisher authorizes the Library to offer a specific CD-ROM on a local area network for up to five simultaneous users in five different reading rooms. As an alternative, the publisher may decide to sign the stand-alone workstation agreement when depositing a CD-ROM for copyright. This agreement allows access only at two different stand-alone workstations within the Library of Congress.
A third agreement will be signed by Library patrons who are downloading or copying material from a CD-ROM. This document acknowledges use of the material for research purposes and prohibits wholesale downloading or further electronic dissemination of search results by the user. The fourth document outlines the general policy at the Library of Congress regarding the use of CD-ROM copyright deposits.
Steve Metalitz, general counsel for the Information Industry Association, called these agreements "a milestone in adapting the provisions of the copyright act to the age of electronic information."
Carol Risher, vice president for copyright and new technologies at the Association of American Publishers, elaborated on the need for these agreements.
"When the Copyright Act of 1976 was written," she said, "Congress tried to anticipate all the new technologies. They specifically stated that copyright would extend to all works 'fixed in any media now known or later developed from which it could be perceived directly or with the aid of a machine.' And with that language, they dealt with the whole future. It sounded wonderful.
"But we found that while the Copyright Act has stood the test of time, the regulations have not anticipated how far we would come. And that was why we needed to sit down and realize the problems and concerns and match them to the needs of the user community."
At the ceremony, representatives of three publishers presented acting Deputy Librarian of Congress Daniel Mulhollan the first CD-ROMs deposited under the new agreements.
Bonnie Lieberman, executive vice president of John Wiley & Sons, presented two copies of "CD-Calculus," an interactive version of the best-selling "Calculus, 4/e," plus its accompanying "Student Solutions Manual," and "Calculus Companion" with full-text search capability.
Virginia Antevil of the American Psychological Association presented "PsycLIT," a CD-ROM version of the PsycINFO data base published by her organization. "PsycLIT" covers psychological literature from nearly 50 countries in more than two dozen languages.
Finally, Anne Reinke Strong of Macmillan New Media presented the "AIDS Compact Library," a comprehensive collection of data bases on the clinical, social, economic and political aspects of AIDS research and treatment.
These three CD-ROM publications passed swiftly to John Kimball, supervisor of the Machine Readable Collections Reading Room, where the CD-ROM publications will be accessible to library patrons under the new rules.
In the space of only a few minutes, these publications symbolically passed through the Copyright Office, Selections Office and into the reading room, a process that normally takes about eight weeks. With thousands of new titles waiting in the wings, the Library of Congress could not afford to waste any time.
