Slashdot Mirror
Hotel Being Sued for Using the Dewey Decimal System
cbull writes "Did you know the Dewey Decimal System isn't in the public domain? The rights are owned by the Online Computer Library Center. They are suing the Library Hotel in New York for trademark infringement. In addition, according to the article, libraries pay at least $500/year to use the system."
Next thing you know, someone's going to start charging for Linux.
Oh, wait...
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Hmm... from what I've found out about DDC, it seems like my school library uses it.
r o.pdf
I really doubt they have a license. And there's no way to find out until tuesday... I can't wait!
Oh, and here's a nice intro on DDC:
http://www.oclc.org/dewey/versions/ddc22print/int
(Why is there a space between the 'r' and 'o'?)
From the article:
"A person who came to their Web site and looked at the way (the hotel) is promoted and marketed would think they were passing themselves off as connected with the owner of the Dewey Decimal Classification system."
Don't you think that a person browsing the website might just think "Oh, they're a theme hotel"?
On the other hand, if libraries have to license it, then I guess that's how it works.
Anything from before the 1920s should be in the public domain, even if nothing after that will ever go into the public domain. I mean, was there indeed some perpetual copyright clause slipped into some bill or another? How could anybody otherwise still own the rights to this?
I think they trademarked the term "Dewey Decimal System". The objection isn't to the use of the system itself (even if it was patented, I doubt the patent would extend to hotel room clasification) it's that the website uses the term (or trademark) Dewey Decimal System all over it.
Even if the complaint was reasonable, the damages being sought are beyond absurd. Triple the profits the hotel has made since it opened? First, I can't imagine how the OCLC was damaged beyond the loss of revenue they would have gotten from a license. Second, I can't imagine that every cent of profit the hotel made over the last three years was a direct result of their use of the Dewey Decimal system. Perhaps some of it came from, I dunno, being conveniently placed in the middle of New York?
It would only make sense that they should have to prove that every customer who stayed there wouldn't have were it not for their use of the Dewey Decimal system.
It sounds like this non-profit actually serves a useful purpose, but I really hope that if this goes to court, their damages get capped at around $4500 (triple the money the hotel saved by not buying a license).
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Both Dewey and Library of Congress are "divide and conquer" stratergies - that is, you split the search space into smaller and smaller chunks until you find what you're looking for.
This is an acceptable solution when you're searching on paper or your search sapce isn't that large, but today we have computers and far more data.
For example, "Algorithms in C" is a classic text a lot of people here probably own.
But does it belong under "math", "computer science", or "computer languages -> C"? (Dewey seperates Computing out into a seperate category, rather than placing it under math).
The answer, of course, is all three.
The ideal system would be a free-text search of all the books in the catalogue. But until we can do that, keywords and searchable abstracts are more useful than categories. Just put the damn books on the shelf in order of author.
One more time: The hotel isn't just using the classification system, it stole the trademark "Dewey Decimal" to advertise a profit-making business that uses the system. If Microsoft decided to rename its Services for Unix product to Linux.NET without getting Mr. Torvald's permission, would that be okay?