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."

School library

[Leffe]

Hmm... from what I've found out about DDC, it seems like my school library uses it.

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/intr o.pdf [oclc.org]
(Why is there a space between the 'r' and 'o'?)

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Out of business

[signe]

Read the article first, please.

The lawsuit said the center sent three letters to Kallan from October 2000 to October 2002, asking for acknowledgment of Online's ownership of the Dewey trademarks, but the hotel owner didn't respond.

While I agree the hotel should pay the back licensing fees, I think this lawsuit is a little excessive. But given that they said letters were sent, it's probably just to get the hotel's attention. The OCLC even says at the bottom of the article that they're looking to settle, and they don't want the hotel to go out of business. They just want a licensing agreement.

I've been to the Library Hotel. It's a really nice place. Yes, the books play an integral part in the ambiance of the hotel. But the use of the Dewey Decimal System is hardly the biggest thing they've got going for them, or the most important. They could easily drop the DDC classifications of the floors and rooms and the hotel would lose nothing by it.

-Todd

Re:Perhaps this is why.

[analog_line]

It's the Library of Congress system, for reasons which should be fairly self explanatory. When I was in high school and during the summers in college, I worked at my local library. During about 4-5 years of time, I and several other people went about the arduous task of methodically stripping the plastic protector off of each hardcover's dust jacket, peel the Dewey Decimal label off, apply the correct LOC label, doublecheck that the right LOC label was applied, put a new plastic covering on the dust jacket (harder than you may think) and reshelve it in the constantly expanding and moving LOC section. All the while with confused patrons complaining because they're utterly used to the old Dewey method and the new fangled thing is throwing them for a loop. They spent FAR more than $500/year doing this switchover, just on how much they paid me on any given year I was there.

Support your local library, btw, even in the days of the Patriot Act. Librarians are good people, and get a bad rap for being boring that they just don't deserve. Go browse around, most libraries have a few comfortable chairs for reading if you don't feel comfortable creating a record that you checked a particular book out. Never know what you might find in a library. Working at my library was one of the best times in my life.

Re:Happy Birthday

[Anonymous Coward]

I here you are also supposed to pay royalties when you sing the "Happy Birthday" song in public. Strange world.

True [snopes.com]

Re:Created in 1873?

[annodomini]

That's copyright you're thinking of. According to the article, they are suing for trademark infringement. Trademarks are perpetual; they last forever, as long as you don't allow them to be diluted. That's why companies like Warner Brothers sue their fans for having websites with Harry Potter in their domain name. They don't want there to be a chance of their trademark being diluted to the point where they no longer have control over it.

It's a Trademark infringement case.

[ExRex]

The suit is for trademark infringement, not copyright or patent infringement.

In the U.S. Trademark rights can be held indefinitely by the registrant, or it's successors in interest as in this case, with timely filing of required paperwork and paying of appropriate fees.

What I find amusing is that the designer's of the hotel clearly did not do their homework. The research branch of the New York Public Library doesn't even use the Dewey system. It uses the Library of Congress categories. Here's the NYPL's online catalog. [nypl.org] I guess the designer's went into the Library to look at the architecture, but didn't actually bother to call for a book, or even check the catalog. Had they, they wouldn't be in this pickle.

Re:Oh good grief

[Meowing]

and i wasn't aware that our library paid a license fee. (In fact, i don't remember that in our expenses at all, which makes me wonder whether it fell under 'miscellaneous,' or whether our relatively-new library simply failed to bother...)

It's sort of a hidden fee. The DDC book costs about $400, new edition every 3 years or so.

Note though, that the hotel isn't being sued for using the classification system, but for infringing on the Dewey trademark for commercial purposes.

Random stuff about the DDC system

[Cryptonom]

One reson that the DDC hasn't entered the Public Doman yet is that the ownrs kep puting out a new "verzon" every year or so. This is necesary from a clasification standpoint in that new things are neding to be clasified (in Dewey's day, it was a bit hard to imagin computer softwar neding to be put in a library). But it does mean that every tim a new version is published, it is given a seperat copyrit (since the content realy is diferent). A rough overview of the system can be sen her: http://www.tnrdlib.bc.ca/dewey.html Dewey was also a proponent of simplified speling: http://www.milton.k12.nh.us/Nute/melvil_dewey.htm# toc

LOC?

[sootman]

At my college (CSU, Chico) the library uses the Library of Congress system. Anyone know if that is free? If it originated with the taxpayer-supported US Gov, I would think it should be free.

Re:This could be good

[TomV]

Free-text is a useful adjunct for testing relevance of your initial hits, but it's not a sound basis for a classification as such. The difficulty with Free Text is the lack / impossibility of a proper Thesaurus (in the librarian's sense of the word, a graph of authoritative terms, their synonyms *and* their relationships). Personally I'd like an underlying Faceted classification (fundamentally bottom-up rather than top-down / hierarchical), and then some controlled-vocabulary descriptors, plus othe indicators and maybe free-text as the icing on the cake. The trouble with getting Free Text to do all the work is that before you can do that, you just need to get the Universal Natural Language Parser sorted out to look after the semantics.

The trouble with schemes like DDC or LOC is that you have to create a category *before* you can assign an item to that category. The first faceted scheme, Ranganathan's Colon classification , marked every item with five, colon-delimited facets, in the form personality:matter:energy:space:time, but most modern faceted schemes are a little less philosophical about it. If you need a new description within a facet, you're free to create one.

The only time I ever had to build a specialist class scheme for a library I was restructuring, I went faceted - DDC or LOC would have been quick and easy but wouldn't have reflected the ways my particular customers were likely to want to approach the information I was providing.

Not really useful as a shelving guide in a general-purpose library, but as a class scheme per se, faceted is lovely.

TomV

Re:whichever it is, it should have expired

[the eric conspiracy]

And if it's trademarked, there shouldn't be any problem, since they don't call themselves the "Dewey Decimal Hotel."

It's trademarked, and there is a problem because they are using the Dewey Decimal System name in their advertising [citysearch.com] without permission.

Re:This could be good

[Blondie-Wan]

I can find web pages about Apple MacIntosh and I can find pages about growing Apple MacIntoshes, but it's hard to separate the pages about computers from those about cookery.

Well, actually, I don't think it should be a problem in this case - the fruit is spelled McIntosh (no "a," both "M" and "I" capitalized). Of course you might still get pages about the computer intermingled with ones about raincoats (and none of this will be of much use to someone with the kind of free-and-easy, nonconformist approach to spelling frequently exhibited on Slashdot ;) )...

Re:A better history

[TomV]

Oh, but DDC1, published 130 years ago by someone who died 72 years ago, is in the public domain now.

It's pretty useless if you want to classify 20th century history, or airplanes, or cars or computers. Relativity and Quantum, just where exactly in Physics should those go?

DDC22, on the other hand, is latest, fairly-up-to-date product of immense amounts of hard (and it must be said mind-blowingly boring) work by dedicated specialists who classified 110,000 new items last year, and will no doubt have to classify even more this year, and more the year after. Nobody's stopping you from using the 'invention' (a hierarchical classification scheme using numeric indicators), it's just the trademark and the copyrighted content of the Dewey implementation of this invention that's protected.

AFAIK, anything in a hundred year old Britannica is out of copyright, as are many early versions of Dewey. But the world moves on. And in the absence of de facto standards like DDC or LOC, every library would have to classify every new accession from first principles (as I say, both specialised, and mind-damagingly dull work), and there wouldn't be any consistency between libraries, which is a useful collateral bonus of the big schemes.

tomV

Re:This could be good

[kotj.mf]

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.

I worked as a reference assistant at a large urban public library for 5+ years, and in my experience, less than half of the people who came in were doing research via the catalog. Most of them were simply browsing by subject. 99% of the time, it was faster and easier to simply point them to the spot on the shelves where a particular subject number was.

I mean, we were five floors covering an entire city block... would you really want to have to walk from one extreme of the building to grab Linux Apache Web Server Administration by Charles Aulds to the other end to get Matt Welsh's Running Linux? In my library, I could just point to to a single shelf with the 005's.

Shelving by author is fine, barely, for fiction, where a lot people tend to read every book by a particular author. Even then, a lot of large libraries tend to split stuff up by genre much like your local bookstore. But for nonfiction, organizing by subject for browsing and casual research is the only way to go.

As for Dewey vs. LC, well, that's up there with vi and Emacs. LC works well for academic libraries where there's a hell of a lot more in-depth research going on, while Dewey works best for public libraries. I find Dewey more intuitive, but that's probably because I know it best. In research institutions, where most patrons have the time to spend a half hour in front of a catalog session, LC seems to fit the bill. YMMV, natch.

Case summary

[danila]

Initially I read the Slashdot comments only and was under the impression that the DDC's lawsuit may have some merit. But after visiting the hotel's site I was completely fucking outraged at the American IP legal climate...

Here is what I found. The hotel uses something which very much resembles the original DDC classification, which is in public domain. As the site states, "Each of the ten guestroom floors of the Library is dedicated to one of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System: Social Sciences, Literature, Languages, History, Math & Science, General Knowledge, Technology, Philosophy, The Arts and Religion. Each of the sixty exquisitely appointed accommodations have been individually adorned with a collection of art and books relevant to one distinctive topic within the category of floor [libraryhotel.com] it belongs to.".

It's simply fucking insane that DDC is suing the hotel for that. I mean, WTF?! They claim trademark infridgement? They use the basic classification which is probably the same as original one, created 130 years ago and is now in public domain. If they use it, they are completely within their rights to call it "Dewey Decimal System" because that's what it is. And it's not like the hotel is in any competition with DDC. Nor any customers will be confused that the hotel is somehow affiliated with DDC. Stupid lawsuit and the whole concept of IP should be trashed. It's long overdue.

This is exactly what the law is for.

[Frobnicator]

I never would have imagined the Dewey Decimal System was patented and that libraries have pay money, each year, to use it in their library.

First, there is a big difference between patents and trademarks. They are (CORRECTLY) claiming trademark violation.

They own the trademark on Dewey Decimal System and other words. They manage the numbering system. The actual numbering system can be used by anybody, although businesses (not public libraries) may need to pay roalties based on their uses of the system.

I never knew so many /. posters were so ignorant of trademark, service marks, patants, and copyright distinctions.

• Trademark & service marks = ownership of a particular mark for a particular usage in a particular domain which can be renewed as long as the mark is in use, to prevent a group's name from being tarnished by shoddy companies.
• Patants = limited monopolies on the use of a method, to ensure that inventors have time to transform ideas into marketable (and profitable) products.
• Copyrights = (supposedly) limited term restrictions on reproduction of any recorded information, to allow authors and artists to collect royalties.

They can claim trademark violations because they are using the marks owned by OCLC without permission. It would be like some no-name snack company naming their products "Twinkies" and "Ding-Dongs". Now I'm off to paste this to all the others who don't bother to understand the law before spouting off about how bad it is.

frob

Re:This could be good

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not that simple. Its not just about numbers. Its about what number you assign a book. An earlier post had an example about the book algorithms in C. Does it go under math or computer science. Does a book about architectural art go under art or architecture? Does a book about the technical details of WWII tanks go under engineering or warfare or history? The people that run the DDC have entire teams of people that go through and make decisions like this. I gave really basic examples but once you really get into the heirarchy things can get more complicated. Especialy when you take into account that not all librarys need just the top couple of levels. Sure that works for public librarys, but what if you're running say, a religious library where you've got 100,000 books just about religion. The DDC has special addendums to itself just for this type of instance to allow very specific catagorization for librarys of that type and developing all that isn't cheap. The $500/year that librarys have to pay really isn't all that bad when you look at it in those terms.

--Greg

trademark is a Strange Creature(tm)

[akahige]

Unlike patents, there is NO equivalent to prior art when it comes to trademark. Anyone can, at anytime, register a trademark on the most mundane thing or obvious thing. Trademarks -- unlike copyright and patents -- do not expire. It's the one thing that "creators" can be said to continuously own. An interesting application of this concept is the case of Tarzan. Created by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912, the work itself is now in the public domain. HOWEVER, Burroughs also had the forethought to register Tarzan as a trademark. That means a couple of things: 1) anyone can make a film adaptation of Tarzan of the Apes without having to pay money to the Burroughs estate; 2) no one can create *new* stories featuring the trademark protected character of Tarzan without they are licensed by same said Burroughs estate. The heirs of Conan Doyle were exceptionally displeased with things like Without a Clue and the Sherlock Holmes related stories on Star Trek: TNG, but since they had no legal protection, there wasn't a whole lot they could do about it. Now, this begs an interesting question -- how is it, exactly, that the Doyle estate (or anyone else) could not (or cannot) register Holmes and Watson as a trademark, but Forest Press could register "Dewey Decimal Classification" some 31 years after the death of Melvil Dewey, and almost 100 years after its creation? I haven't a clue...

check out the DDCS trademark filing [uspto.gov].