Millennium minutes: a look back at licensing

The seemingly ubiquitous license agreement has a longer history than our readers might imagine or remember. It has roots deep in contract law, and also has copyright, patent, and trademark parentage. Librarians tend to think of licenses in terms of databases and fulltext e-journals, however, it started with licensing of software and electronic data years ago. DIALOG, Lexis-Nexis, OCLC, to name a few, have had contracts and licenses for use of data for decades. Although there is an old and rich literature written for the publisher and developer of software and databases, for this article, I will focus on librarians and library literature to give an informal and personal look back at licensing.