Pitchforks for OCLC: rebellion against mandatory licensing for cooperatively developed catalog data

The title is perhaps a bit over the top, but not really; there's discontent visible at a bunch of levels about OCLC's proposed new terms of service for the bibliographic data it has gathered over time.  It's reminiscent of the Facebook user revolt about their proposed terms of service, of squabbles over IMDB for movies, CDDB for music, and even the WHOIS database of Internet hosts.

The nature of the dispute is all too typical in this age of user-generated content.  A bunch of organizations collaborate to develop a valuable set of data; a central organization is set up to manage and develop that data set; and then that central organization asserts control over the data as an asset which they use as a core of some new set of services.  

Some news clips to give you a sense for the rhetoric.  

Self-described open-data crazies: Raw Thought: Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab

They’ve used the resulting flow of cash to fund a spree of acquisitions of commercial companies and expand into other fields. Their small Ohio office has grown into a huge executive complex. They’ve used their power and influence to put other library suppliers out of business so they can sell the same products themselves. And, throughout it all, they’ve become increasingly closed, even secretive.

The Association of Research Libraries:

"The new Policy is clearly intended as a unilateral contract, unilaterally imposed on any entity using records from the WorldCat database, including member libraries.... The member community has seen the introduction of the new Policy as a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship between OCLC and its member libraries. In the eyes of the community, the guidelines expressed a mutual social contract, and the new Policy represents an authoritarian, unilaterally imposed legal restriction."

Greedy, grasping commercial companies (oops, that would be Tim Spalding of LibraryThing):

It's also important to see that, before OCLC started threatening companies and non-profits doing interesting but non-competing things with book data—notably LibLime, Open Library and LibraryThing—they had none of the problems they have now. Now, by attempting to control all book data, they've spurred the creation of LibLime's‡Biblios system, a free, free-data alternative to OCLC and, well, sent me, Aaron Swartz of Open Library anddozens of prominent library bloggers into orbit. 

For some history:

CDDB was a free catalog of tracks on CDs; it turned into Gracenote and was taken private, and now is a part of Sony.

IMDB started with the Usenet rec.arts.movies FAQs, and was bought up by Amazon.

WHOIS, a directory of hosts on the Internet, was privatized in the early 1990s, and the protocols changed to break previous clients and restrict access.

UPDATE: Much more coverage and tracking of this on the OCLC Policy Change page of the Code4Lib Wiki.