<div dir="ltr"><div>Dear Igor,</div><div dir="ltr">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.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div>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:</div><div><ol><li>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.</li><li>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.<br></li><li>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.</li><li>We notify the publisher that the questionable session has ceased and that our IP address suspension should be ended.</li></ol><div>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.</div></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:12.8px">Mark Winek</span><br style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:12.8px">Georgetown University</span> Library<br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 10:58 AM <<a href="mailto:igor.hammer@unibe.ch" target="_blank">igor.hammer@unibe.ch</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div lang="DE-CH">
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<p class="MsoNormal">Hello,<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Best,<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Igor<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE">--------------------------------------------------------------
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE">Universität Bern
</span><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE">Universitätsbibliothek Bern</span><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE">Digitale Dienste & Open Science</span><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE"> </span><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE">Igor Hammer</span></b><b><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE">I+D-Spezialist</span><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE"> </span><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE">Hochschulstrasse 6</span><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE">3012 Bern
</span><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE">Schweiz
</span><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE">Tel. +41 31 684 95 89</span><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif" lang="DE"><a href="mailto:igor.hammer@unibe.ch" target="_blank"><span style="color:blue">igor.hammer@unibe.ch</span></a><span style="color:blue">
</span></span><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE"><a href="https://www.unibe.ch/ub" target="_blank"><span style="color:blue">https://www.unibe.ch/ub</span></a>
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt" lang="DE">(Mo, Di, Do ganztags + Fr Vormittag)<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
</div>
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