Posted September 29, 2003.

OCLC Sues Library Hotel for Trademark Infringement

The nonprofit library services organization OCLC has filed a trademark infringement complaint against a New York City hotel that uses the Dewey Decimal Classification to identify its guestrooms and market its accommodations. The Library Hotel, located on Madison Avenue near the New York Public Library, opened in 2000 and advertises that each of its floors “honors one of the 10 categories of the DDC” and each guestroom offers a “collection of books and art exploring a distinctive topic within the category or floor it belongs to.”

Dublin, Ohio–based OCLC acquired the rights to the DDC in 1988 when it bought Forest Press, which publishes the classification system. In announcing the legal action, OCLC stated that in the past three years it had “made three written requests to The Library Hotel asking the Hotel to acknowledge and attribute ownership of the Dewey trademarks to OCLC” but the owners refused to do so.

The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus, Ohio, September 10, seeks triple the hotel’s profits since its opening, or triple OCLC’s damages, whichever is greater.

“A person who came to their website and looked at the way [the hotel] is promoted and marketed would think they were passing themselves off as connected with the owner of the Dewey Decimal Classification system,” said Joseph R. Dreitler, a lawyer representing OCLC. Dreitler suggested in a September 20 Associated Press report that his client would be willing to settle with the owners, but “if they want to continue to use it, there certainly has to be some sort of a license to the Library Hotel.”

Posted September 29, 2003.