FISCAL

The Southwest Center for Codes and Standards, a fee-based service at New Mexico State University uses Internation Handling Services to supplement its standards collection. Out of 44 sets of standards, IHS provides six. Mr. Richard Taibl, Vice President, Western Area for IHS sent us a letter on July 20, stating that we were in violation of our agreement and possibly the Copyright Law by providing service to help our clients obtain standards information and charging a fee for that service.

I announced the action at the FISCAL meeting in Tempe, AZ on Oct. 8. At the meeting I formed a Users Group to keep Codes and Standards users informed of future developments.         

On October 12, representatives of the NMSU Library met with representatives of IHS, a major codes and standards supplier, to discuss the agreement between IHS and NMSU and to exchange points of view on copyright. What follows is our informal understanding of the IHS point-of-view.

	IHS requested NMSU to limit access to codes and standards to only
	those individuals using the NMSU library in person.  IHS further 
	requested that NMSU provide no codes and standards information to
	any government contractors. IHS requested we eliminate both 
	fee-based and interlibrary loan access to codes and standards 
	information.

IHS indicated that NMSU's provision of copies to users unable to physically come to the library does not agree with their understanding of copyright law.

We told them that we modeled our operation after several of the fee-based services that existed in the country and they said that they had talked with some libraries and would talk to the rest. We tried to find common ground to work with them, but we could not reach an agreement.

We received a letter dated October 20 from Mr. Rick Taibl in which he states "fulfillment of document orders from the IHS system is not only in violation of the letter and intent of the IHS' Terms and Conditions, but also of the Copyright Act. Our primary concern is that your enterprise violated the rights and interests of our Standards Bodies licensors. As a secondary concern, your activities are detrimental to the commerciality of IHS products, and to the interests of our Global Engineering Documents division." He further states "Accordingly, and under the Terms and Conditions to which you have agreed, we are demanding that you cease and desist all use of the IHS systems, including unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted materials, and return those systems, post paid, to IHS headquarters in Englewood, Colorado."

If you would like to have additional information or have been approached by IHS regarding these requirements please let us know.

Thank you, Ed Mayfield
Phone: (505)646-6834 Received on Tue Nov 03 1992 - 15:50:09 GMT