suppose user A signs up for Lexis Nexis and then puts an app on his machine that would take queries from users B and C, send to Lexis Nexis and transmit results back to his buddies, hence saving them on the costs of the license.
Do they have countermeasures to prevent that? E.g. do they cap the number of queries or number of documents that a single account can access per day? Or are they cheap enough that Westerners wouldn’t bother doing that?
I can’t imagine it being that big of a deal, what with hundreds of university libraries having unlimited access already. I’m going to blindly guess that most of their income is from institutional, not individual, sales.
I can only speak from a sample size of three, but in the three companies where I worked that had Lexis Nexis, in all cases, we signed up for the cheaper small business (one user name) license, and shared it among the staff so that any one person could use if no one else was. If you tried to log on and couldn’t get on, you simply walked down the hall and figured out who was on it.
If someone was doing a long series of searches and was logged on, but you needed something quick, they would run a quick search for you, drop the results in an e-mail/ word doc, and send it to you.
The number of queries we’d run in any given week would vary wildly, so I can’t imagine they were screening for abuse based on the number of searches, though perhaps even in heavy use weeks we may have been below the threshold that would make it obvious we were sharing an account.
In short, while it violates the license agreement, I highly doubt anyone would really care if users B and C used account holder A’s access. Now if you make it hundreds of users, well, they might notice that…
I used to work for LexisNexis in the early 2000s. At that time, depending on the particular service you were using, you either logged on with a username/password (usually a law firm or business) or via an authenticated IP address (usually a university). There was no cap on the usage, but we did track the usage (that was actually my job), which we could note down to the username or individual IP level (and time and date of access, etc.), so if there were any unusually large spikes, we would look into it.
I haven’t worked there in almost 10 years, though, and I don’t know what they do now or what kind of counter-fraud measures they have implemented.