I think that if I were negotiating this contract, I'd insist
on
changes to this sentence:
> If such monitoring indicates you are not in compliance
with
> this Agreement or if fraudulent activity is suspected,
> Hoover's, Inc. reserves the right to take such action
as it
> deems necessary, including, but not limited to,
assessing
> additional charges for users or downloaded records in
excess of
> the number authorized, or suspension or termination of
the
> account.
The kind of monitoring Hoover's describes here wouldn't
bother
me, but the remedy language is unacceptably open-ended. One
major purpose of a license agreement is to define 1) what
constitutes a breach of its terms, and 2) what actions are
mutually acceptable in the event of a breach. What you've
got
here is a license that says "Hoover's can do anything
it wants in
the event that it feels a breach has taken place," and
that's
ridiculous. Hoover's needs to say 1) what constitutes a
breach
(i.e., what level of downloading will they take as evidence
of
abuse) and 2) exactly what it plans to do if that happens:
are
they going to disable the offending IP address, or disable
your
whole campus's access, or charge you extra (and if so, how
much
and by what mechanism?), etc. As it stands, this sentence
says
Hoover's will decide whether a breach has happened and will
decide how much to penalize you for it. Signing this
license
would be like signing a blank check made out to Hoover's.
----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand unr.edu
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