Yet another followup post on Harvard and EBSCO linking

Peter Murray at Distruptive Library Technology Jester (aka DLTJ) has done a bunch of reading and thinking about the recently-hot issue of Harvard Business School Publishing charging extra to allow the use of persistent URLs in course reserves and content management systems. in his post, EBSCO in Cahoots With Harvard Business Press, he goes in to detail about how Harvard is likely determining whether links are coming from course reserves or a CMS, and looks at EBSCO's terms of use and privacy policy.   He concludes with he following unanswered questions:

And what is EBSCO's role in this? Isn't a library's contract with EBSCO, not Harvard Business Publishing? Is EBSCO earning more revenue from this HBP license requirement to enable deep linking to article content? If so, isn't that just an incentive for EBSCO to do the same with other high-profile publishers?

To me it sounds as though we can complain all we like, but both EBSCO and Harvard are legally covered.  I guess one more question is how much bad publicity do they want to receive over this policy?

I encourage you to read Peter's entire post.