OCLC Files Motion To Dismiss SkyRiver/III Lawsuit
By David Rapp Dec 16, 2010OCLC filed a motion this week with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio to dismiss the lawsuit brought against it in July by bibliographic services company SkyRiver Technology Solutions and library automation company Innovative Interfaces (III).
In its July complaint, SkyRiver and III, both companies owned by businessman Jerry Kline, charged OCLC with a range of anticompetitive business practices and demanded relief, including that competitive commercial interests be given access to OCLC's WorldCat database at "just and reasonable" terms.
OCLC's motion comes on the heels of a recent order granting a change of venue for OCLC from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where SkyRiver and III are based, to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, where OCLC is headquartered.
OCLC motion
In the motion (available in full as a PDF on the OCLC website), OCLC addresses the allegations in the SkyRiver/III complaint, denies wrongdoing, and states that SkyRiver and III "have not suffered any antitrust injury and lack antitrust standing," and that the court should dismiss the suit on that basis. The motion states, in part:
"This case arises because Plaintiffs believe they are entitled to free access to OCLC's proprietary [WorldCat] service...While framed as an antitrust case, Plaintiffs' Complaint alleges only that OCLC has engaged in the types of appropriate behaviors expected of competitors: compete vigorously on price (or, at worst, price a product too high), work with libraries to develop new products, introduce innovative new products that threaten Plaintiffs' profitability, and sell less expensive subscriptions than à la carte services."
In a statement to OCLC members, OCLC CEO and president Jay Jordan said that OCLC expects its motion to be considered by the court by February 2011.
SkyRiver response
SkyRiver president Leslie Straus told LJ that OCLC's motion to dismiss was not unexpected, and that "it really doesn't change anything." SkyRiver's attorneys, she said, are currently preparing a response to the motion.
In a statement released on December 15, Straus said: "Our position remains as it was in July when we filed suit—that OCLC has engaged in business practices which ultimately will be found to be illegal."
Straus added that the trigger for the complaint was what SkyRiver calls "OCLC's imposition of punitive pricing" against Michigan State University (MSU) and California State University, Long Beach, which both migrated to SkyRiver for cataloging services. As reported in LJ in February, MSU reached an impasse with OCLC over costs for batch-loading records after becoming an early adopter of SkyRiver's services.
III's involvement, the statement added, was spurred by OCLC's entry into the integrated library system (ILS) market "through anticompetitive conduct and anticompetitive agreements, as well as by its restrictions against for-profit firms with regard to access to the WorldCat database." OCLC's cloud-computing-based ILS, Web-scale Management Services, is currently under development and uses WorldCat Local as its discovery layer.
Weighing in
Librarian and blogger Karen Coyle, in two posts on her blog Coyle's InFormation, took issue with some of the language in the OCLC motion, which occasionally, in her opinion, "plummets into sarcasm and nastiness." She cites as examples OCLC's repeated characterizations of SkyRiver's product as "inferior."
She also expressed concern that the motion does not clarify the distinction between library records and WorldCat records, and, as such, could "play on the court's ignorance of the library world and of OCLC's definitions."
[UPDATE 12/17:] William Hannay, an attorney who leads the Antitrust and Trade Regulation Practice Group at law firm Schiff Hardin, expressed a similar sentiment, and thus thought an early dismissal unlikely.
Given presiding judge Michael Watson's likely inexperience with the library world, he told LJ, "my guess is that he will not be inclined to dig into the tricky nuances of the Sherman Act [antitrust law] and grant a motion to dismiss at this early stage of the proceedings. Rather, I would think he is more likely to let the plaintiffs take discovery to substantiate their claims. The judge could then entertain a motion for summary judgment by OCLC if and when the facts are clearer."
(Hannay recently commented on the OCLC-SkyRiver/III lawsuit during a presentation at the 2010 Charleston Conference last month. His presentation slides can be viewed here.)
