Hotel Being Sued for Using the Dewey Decimal System 419
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."
This could be good (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of business (Score:5, Insightful)
Connections (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Perhaps this is why. (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't get it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Patents would make a sort of sense, but Dewy Decimal dates back to 1873, so it can't be a patent. Copyright doesn't seem to apply since there isn't obviously a "work" being copied.
What gives? Is it just a matter of the trademark?
Why not use the LC system? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Trademarked? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This could be good (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This could be good (Score:3, Insightful)
Needless to say, this implementation gave me a particular distain for LOC, and even if it is a better system, I don't think that I'll ever like it.
Re:Question (Score:1, Insightful)
If you are the only doctor who knows how to cure something why tell your competition?! Just wait a noble gets sick and rake in the cash!
Or you know how to build the strongest lightest armor, are you gonna go publishing a howto our are you gong to keep it secret to yourself and your guild?
Re:This could be good (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:A better history (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A better history (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a trademark infringement case, not patent or copyright. Assuming that's the only issue, OCLC is not complaining that the hotel uses certain ranges of numbers to classify books (that would be patent infringement, but as the parent points out the patent would long since have expired), but that the hotel uses a trademarked term with Dewey in it in their advertising and promotion -- in effect, that they're making a profit off of OCLC's "brand". If I'm understanding this correctly, there would be no problem if the Library Hotel had used the same numbers with the same meanings, but had referred to it throughout as the Library Hotel Classification System or something like that. (They'd probably even have been fine if they'd said that it was "similar to the Dewey Decimal classification system. Dewey Decimal is a trademark of OCLC.")
Yes, it still seems kind of silly, but it's not the gross abuse of IP law or the ridiculous state of affairs that lots of respondents are taking it for. It's more as if I opened the Soup Hotel, and named all the floors after trademarked Campbell's Soup brand names. I'd be fine if I named the floors "Chicken and Rice" and "Beef Stew", but if I named them "Campbell's Mega Noodle" and "Campbell's Chicken & Stars" and used promotional material that talked about all the soup flavours you grew up with, and service as good as the soup you love, and that sort of thing, then you can bet Campbell's Soup would come after me if I didn't have a licensing agreement with them, because I'm profiting off of their trademark.
In fact, the fact that OCLC tried a couple of times to contact the hotel before pursuing legal action makes me think that they may mostly care about this because they don't want to lose the trademark (which can happen if you don't defend it and people start using it generically).
Re:Out of business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This could be good (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no, no, no.
What is needed is that PLUS exactly what you hinted at: faceted classification.
Books can be arranged on the shelves by author or FILO or whatever, but they should be, in the age of computers, indexed by multiple heirarchical facets.
Keywords and free-text searches are far too unreliable, even in the age of Google. If you're doing serious research, you can't rely on the first Google hit, you need to try several different methods. In fact, Google's methodology, ranking by weighted hyperlink popularity, wouldn't apply to books.
What you need are a combination of faceted classification (like the subject entries in the cataloging software most libraries use) and free-text as well as abstract searching. Quite frankly, humans and the software they write are too stupid to classify everything well enough to use one system or another exclusively.
Re:Out of business (Score:3, Insightful)
OCLC owns their specific system. If you want to create your own subject hierarchy, be my guest.
Re:This could be good (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, from a user's point of view. But just think about the implementation that makes those easy searches possible.
Pretty impressive eh? Not exactly rocket science, but pretty darned close.
wbs.
Re:This could be good (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you tried adding the words "computer" or "fruit" to your query?
But that's precisely my point: only the most pedantic writer is going to qualify which sort of apple he's talking about, because he'll expect his reader to pick it up from context.
Consider: the author won't write:and he won't write a recipe specifying:
The reader is expected, in anything other than a children's book, to figure out that "compile" and "program" make the Apple unambiguosly a computer; likewise the heading "Recipe" and "thinly sliced" clue in the reader that we expect him to slice fruits, not silicon.
But the universe of possible context clues is far too big to specify everytime I want to do a full-text search: "compile", and "program" indicate a computer, but so would "IRC", "firewall" and "slashdot", and the list goes on and on. Unless adding the word "computer" also implicity adds the thousands of context clues that tell the reader an Apple computer, not a red fruit, is being written about, a full-text search isn't as helpful as you might guess.
Re:This could be good (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it could. But instead of hyperlinks, it would use references/bibliographies. So if my book takes a quote from your book, that would have the same effect as a hyperlink on a website.
Then, the most-quoted books would get the highest search results. If everybody is talking about your book, it could just be the one you're looking for
Re:This could be good (Score:2, Insightful)
*Bangs head on wall*
Been to a library lately?
WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK THEY ARE DOING??
Key is, they have to have SOME method for choosing which books go where on the shelf, so mine as well use a preexisting system that is already mapped out. Does it matter if the mappings are a little strange some times? No, because we have computers to sort it all out for us!
Re:Case summary (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case, the hotel is using a trademark of OCLC, and it is just as clear-cut as if you were to start selling Twinkies and Ding-Dongs.
frob
Re:Case summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it's completely clear-cut. The hotel is totally within their rights to call the system by its name. If they sell Smirnoff vodka in their bar, they can call it "Smirnoff". If they have CNN showing on a TV in the hall they can call it "CNN". If they have XBoxes in rooms, they can call them "XBoxes". And if they happen to use DDC for classification, they have the right to clearly say that. They do not claim their own hotel is DDC-hotel. They just say, in very plain language, that for every major category in DDC there is a floor in the hotel and for every secondary one there is a room. If the Library hotel [libraryhotel.com] used a different system and called it DDC, I could see the merit in this case, but they clearly use the correct DDC and so "Dewey Decimal System" the only correct way to call it.