Creeping Kanopy

Barbara Fister's post on InsideHigherEd Unkind Rewind (June 26) is totally correct about Kanopy Streaming Video's creepy tactics, contacting users directly when a library cancels its Kanopy contract. This is an outrageous abuse of user data and has the long-term effect of completely undermining librarians' trust in the Kanopy organization.

Barbara references the Twitter feed @Libskrat as an oblique reference to Kanopy complaining to New York Public Library management when a librarian spoke out about their practices on a mailing list (AKA "listserv" but that's trademarked in the USA). Kanopy referenced a supposed NDA and may have threatened legal action. If this violates any NDA my library inadvertently agreed to, then let Kanopy bring it on. I do not see any non-disclosure stipulated in the Kanopy TOS (terms of service), but other terms are fairly creepy: the requirement to submit to binding arbitration by the American Arbitration Association, which is as good as useless. I may seek to cancel my library's Kanopy account on that basis alone. I expect my University General Counsel may in fact require that I do so.

In addition, Kanopy's privacy policy allows them (at 2.(a)), in their view, to abuse librarians' trust outrageously:

We may ask for certain information such as your name, institution name, email address, password and other information. We may retain any messages you send through the Service, and we may also retain other information you voluntarily provide to us. We use this information to operate, maintain and provide to you the features and functionality of the Service, and as further described below.

Barbara Fister (back to her blog) makes one claim, though, with which I differ:

For librarians, my advice is to resist the shiny and trust we are relevant, to value the rights we traditionally have when we purchase content, and push for transparency and fairness in licensing deals.

I did not fail to "resist the shiny" when we began to work with Kanopy in 2014. My library entered into an agreement with Kanopy for good reasons.

We began to work with Kanopy, in the first place, because our Communications school (then department) contracted with Kanopy without informing the library--and then expected to use the library's proxy service. (Actually a rather ignorant former staffer there wanted every student to create her or his own login, an obvious non-starter for Kanopy.) The Communications faculty wanted access to the Media Education Foundation's Media Studies and Communication. Only later did the library add the patron-driven acquisition, user-initiated (PDA) model which proved unsustainably expensive in the past fiscal year. We did so because we needed to move the library into providing streaming video for curricular use, not because it is "shiny" (. . . and some of it is not!)

With Barbara's help (above), I realize that we happily dodged a bullet. Because we could not cut Kanopy off entirely (Communications still wants and has that MEF license), Kanopy has never contacted our users to deplore our decision to discontinue PDA. What we have done instead is more circumspect. We left Kanopy in our A-Z databases list, but publicly discouraged its use. We removed records for any videos that are not licensed from our discovery service.

When an instructor wants to use a video in class (we have some of those), we attempt to re-direct the instructor to Academic Video ONline (AVON), which we have leased from ProQuest at a more affordable (and controllable) price. If no suitable content is available, we will reluctantly authorize a PDA license for that one video --but we make sure the instructor knows how much this it costs for 365 days. If a student wants access for a class or paper, we gently deny the request. (We can distinguish student requests from faculty because students have a slightly different e-mail domain address.) We make sure that department chairs, program directors, and Deans know how much Kanopy costs. They completely support our plan to control expenses.

So my advice to librarians: don't discontinue Kanopy, simply bury them. Take them out of your A-Z databases list. Remove them from your catalog or discovery service. Act as though they don't exist. Make Kanopy your library's "frenemy." And refuse to knuckle under to anyone's mob-like tactics of intimidation.