OCLC Policy Changes

Last semester I wrote an Independent Study Paper about the potential copyrightability of metadata - particularly in the form of Library Catalog Records. One of the topics I discussed was OCLC's WorldCat, and the unrestricted availability of records to OCLC members. For a variety of reasons, I questioned whether they could assert ownership over the records, if they ever wanted to do so. Just 2 weeks before I had to turn in my paper, OCLC suddenly changed its policy, not to claim ownership of the records per se, but to restrict the way users could use the records. This policy change has caused not a small amount of outrage in the cataloging community, and since the first changes, 2 further revisions have come out. For more information, check out the wiki maintained by Coders for Libraries.