Excessive Download
The University of Hong Kong Libraries

Information providers, publishers and vendors ask to be paid for providing their online databases, electronic journals, and other electronic resources. HKU Libraries has negotiated licenses with these vendors, and paid subscriptions to lease access to this data for the HKU community. Though each of these 1,000s of licenses read differently, they usually all have clauses to the effect that,

	Yes, leasees (ie, HKU students, faculty & staff) can search their electronic resources for valid purposes
	Yes, leasees may download citations and articles for academic research
	No, leasees may not download 'systematically', or 'excessively' from their electronic resources

What does 'systematically download', or 'excessively download' mean? It means that users may not continuously download one article after another, one entire issue of an e-journal after another, the complete run of an entire e-journal, one after another. By extension, it also means that users may not set robots, spiders, or Web wanderers free upon their data repositories, to do this same systematic or excessive downloading. These information providers wish to protect their intellectual poperty. They do not wish to see their entire electronic resource, or massive chunks of the same, pirated away to be hosted on servers outside their control, and thus loose a potential revenue.

What will happen if systematic or excessive downloading happens? If the vendor finds evidence of systematic or excessive downloading, the vendor will contact HKU Libraries, the titular leasee of access to this data, and ask us for an accounting. The vendor will give us the IP address of the PC or workstation from which the offending activity initiated. The vendor may ask us to warn the user of this machine, or, the vendor may, in compliance with the contract between the vendor and HKU Libraries, peremptorily and unilaterally terminate access to this particular electronic resource from _all_ workstations at HKU and any within its extended (HKUPPP) network. After this point, contracts from different vendors sometimes state various other legal and monetary penalties that could be invoked, though usually after a protracted period of non-compliance with the stated contract.

We ask for your understanding and compliance, so that all of HKU will abide by the terms of these contracts and continue to enjoy access to all of the electronic resources that they provide.