[WEB4LIB] Restricting launches to IP-restricted licensed web services

[Eric Hellman]

This is related to the question of "deep" linking, or "Is it legal to 
provide links into someone's web site without their permission?"

In your case, the answer may be contained in licensing agreements 
that you have signed with your information providers. However, it is 
most likely that these agreements have not anticipated the situation 
you describe. The usual consequence is either
1. the license gives no guidance for your use.
or
2. The license is so unintentionally draconian that it forbids your NORMAL use.

If linking is NOT covered by your license, there is NO established 
law to say one way or another whether you are within your rights. All 
the relevant lawsuits to date have been settled out of court and thus 
have left no precedents.

I have written a page of suggestions for appropriate use of 
hyperlinks, http://www.openly.com/link.openly/etiquette.html

In your case, good web design practice would suggest that links to 
non-public services should be labeled as such.

Where you might run into trouble is if you have been given passwords 
and you do not take appropriate steps to prevent their theft.

In general it would be very difficult for a service provider to 
legally maintain that URL's must be secret when in the course of 
their allowed use, they must be disclosed to thousands of users

Eric

>I currently maintain our library's web gateway which provides access to
>numerous licensed services that are IP-address restricted.  We are an
>academic library, and in all cases so far, we have purchased campus-wide
>access and provided a link directly from one of our pages to the licensed
>service.  However, a debate has arisen within our library as to whether we
>should be restricting access to these services on our end, or whether IP
>address restriction is the publisher's responsibility alone.
>
>That is, do we have to restrict access to the page (or create a script) ON
>OUR SERVER that launches the licensed service?  Currently we do not--for
>example, any user, whether affiliated with our institution or not, can get
>into JSTOR or Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe through a link on our web
>site, as long as their IP address is recognized by JSTOR and Lexis-Nexis
>as that of a subscribing institution somewhere.
>
>I realize that some libraries do restrict the ability to launch licensed
>services from their web sites to their own institutional users, and I'm
>sure there are advantages for statistics gathering, providing links to
>proxy servers and so forth. But my question is, are we required to do it
>as a matter of course?
>
>My position has been--other libraries provide direct, unrestricted links
>to licensed services, so it must be OK for us to do it too.  In fact, it
>seems like a violation of the spirit of IP address-restricting for a
>publisher to assume the library will also restrict the access to a single
>specific library web page that launches the service.  But I feel I need
>more muscle behind my argument than that.  Can anyone help?
>
>G. Karen Merguerian
>Bibliographic Services
>Northeastern University Libraries
>Boston, MA 02115
>gmerguer at lynx.neu.edu

Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
http://www.openly.com/           21st Century Information Infrastructure