(15 Jun 2022) The lawsuit was filed by OCLC earlier this week in U.S. Federal Court, Southern District of Ohio. The complaint (32 pages; PDF) is available here. The complete court docket with additional items is also available and is updated as new documents become available.
From the compliant:
“OCLC, Inc., (“OCLC”), by and through counsel, files this Complaint for a temporary restraining order, injunctive relief, and damages against Clarivate, Plc, Clarivate Analytics (US) LLC, ProQuest LLC, and Ex Libris (USA), Inc., (“Defendants”) …
8. In March 2022, OCLC became aware that Defendants are working on a platform called MetaDoor, which Defendants have publicly acknowledged will directly compete with OCLC’s WorldCat®. Instead of devoting the time and other substantial resources that OCLC has invested to create its industry-leading WorldCat®, Defendants have chosen to take shortcuts by using the MetaDoor platform to misappropriate catalog records and metadata created by OCLC, its members, and others.
9. Defendants have been contacting OCLC customers and encouraging them to contribute the bibliographic records from WorldCat®, and provide access to those records from the MetaDoor platform, all of which is in direct breach of those customers’ contractual obligations to OCLC. In addition to tortiously interfering with OCLC’s contractual relationships with its customers, Defendants are also tortiously interfering with OCLC’s prospective business relationships by providing OCLC’s WorldCat® records to MetaDoor users without requiring those users to subscribe to use WorldCat® or otherwise pay OCLC for those records
10. Defendants have also conspired with each other to tortiously interfere with OCLC’s contractual relationships and prospective business relationships.
11. Defendants have publicly stated that they plan to offer MetaDoor to current and future customers for free, which would include access and use of the WorldCat® bibliographic records that are being uploaded, linked to, and/or otherwise transferred into MetaDoor. Defendants’ actions are not purely altruistic, however. Instead, this is just Defendants’ latest attempt to further consolidate their dominant position in the ILS/LSP market. Defendants are engaging in profit-sacrificing behavior to ultimately drive OCLC (and potentially its other competitors) from the ILS/LSP market. And given the importance of WorldCat® to OCLC’s continued operations, Defendants are likely to succeed unless they are stopped from pursuing their current course of wrongful actions.
12. Defendants know that without being able to steal valuable WorldCat® records, MetaDoor will not survive. MetaDoor’s entire structure is built on the back of WorldCat® and the more than five decades worth of work and hundreds of millions of dollars invested by OCLC to create it.”
Infodocket of Library Journal has the latest update here.
