[Eril-l] Mass downloads

[Mark Winek]

Dear Igor,
I share your frustration with the different levels of tolerance that
different publishers have for establishing "mass downloading" thresholds.
It does make it difficult for us to explain the concept to users,
especially when those users want to access a non-infringing quantity of
licensed content in a way that the platform interprets as infringing.

While each publisher has their own standards for constituting mass
downloading, I've found it very useful to establish my own standards of how
I and my colleagues handle these notifications from publishers. This means
that we handle each incident uniformly. When receiving a report we:

   1. Immediately acknowledge the receipt of the notification while copying
   our administrators who also need to be aware of the incident. If the
   publisher has not provided log files pertaining to the infringing activity,
   we ask for them to be sent as soon as possible.
   2. With the log files in hand, we forward them to our library IT
   department, which runs our EZproxy. If the infringing activity is through
   EZproxy, the session can be ended and the user identified to us. If access
   is not through EZproxy, it is forwarded to our university IT for
   investigation and we have to wait for the results.
   3. If the user can be identified, I contact them to notify them of the
   incident, request that they stop the mass downloading, and then seek to
   meet their information need in another way. In most cases, the information
   need is innocent (if not the process) and we can easily work with the user
   to find more appropriate ways of obtaining the content. Of course, the
   identity of the user is never shared with the publisher.
   4. We notify the publisher that the questionable session has ceased and
   that our IP address suspension should be ended.

Between this process and a local download limit on EZproxy to catch some
bulk downloading before suspension by the publisher, I've never had
pushback from a publisher refuse to restore access when the offending
session has been ended and investigated. This process mostly came about
when a publisher was making (somewhat arbitrary) changes to their own
thresholds and flagging relatively minor use as infringing. We seldom
receive these infringement emails from publishers in practice.

Mark Winek
Georgetown University Library


On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 10:58 AM <igor.hammer at unibe.ch> wrote:

> Hello,
>
>
>
> We sometimes receive e-mails from publishers who tell us that somebody
> inside our IP-range has downloaded too many documents from their website so
> that they decided to block the ip-address in question for some time.
>
>
>
> If you receive similar e-mails – how do you react to them? On one hand we
> understand that the publishers want to protect their stock from mass
> downloads on a grand scale. But on the other hand the limits given by some
> publishers seem to me to be quite arbitrary and I don't always see on what
> grounds they base their decision. This makes it quite difficult for us to
> communicate to our customers as the same behaviour that may be no problem
> for one publisher might cause an ip-block from another publisher.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
>
>
> Igor
>
>
>
> -------------------------­­­­­-------------------­­­­------------------
>
>
> Universität Bern
>
> Universitätsbibliothek Bern
>
> Digitale Dienste & Open Science
>
>
>
> *Igor Hammer*
>
> I+D-Spezialist
>
>
>
> Hochschulstrasse 6
>
> 3012 Bern
>
> Schweiz
>
> Tel. +41 31 684 95 89
>
> igor.hammer at unibe.ch
>
> https://www.unibe.ch/ub
>
> (Mo, Di, Do ganztags + Fr Vormittag)
>
>
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