Petition to stop OCLC: let MARC records be free

In this day and age (meaning, with the technology and social web we have) there’s no reason for a giant company to make libraries pay tons of money for access to the library (MARC) records they’re helping to add. It’s like if Wikipedia started charging everyone access to use it. Not only that, it would be like if people did start paying to look at Wikipedia, AND still added content.

Watchdog.net has a petition for you to sign.
(Also, you don’t have to sign up with them to sign the petition.)

Here’s what they have to say:

OCLC, the not-for-profit that provides library services around the world, has gone too far. Originally, it was a library collaborative — one library could catalog a book, upload it to OCLC, and then other libraries could save time by reusing the catalog information. But as the price of such technology has fallen, its prices have risen. It charges membership fees, record retrieval fees, user support fees, and fees for all sorts of additional services. But now it’s gone a step too far — it wants to set the terms of use for every library record ever retrieved through OCLC, so that it can maintain its monopoly in the field. In a very real sense, they’re trying to steal our libraries. We have to make them stop — sign this petition.

For more information, see this wiki page: OCLC Policy Change.

And let the MARC records be freeeeeeee: