Digital Preservation and Copyright Law Report Released
Over the last 18 months or so, JISC has been working with international partners to look into the way that copyright issues affect digital preservation activities and how changes to legislation might facilitate better long-term access to a wide range of scholarly material. The report entitled ‘The Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation’ is available online at: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/resources/pubs/wipo_digital_preservation_final_report2008.pdf
A workshop to discuss the contents of the report was held at the headquarters of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva on Tuesday 15th July and Fred Friend was there to participate in the event and the following is based on bits of his description of the workshop …
The workshop began with an excellent talk by Cliff Lynch of CNI. Cliff began by saying that “digital preservation is one of the biggest challenges of our time”. He pointed to the enormous scale of the content to be preserved by contrast with the small scale of most preservation projects to date. In Cliff’s view, although the technical problems are hard, the legal, economic and societal problems are much more difficult to resolve. We need to establish a culture that honours stewardship. In questions after Cliff’s presentation, I asked him how we could decide what to throw away digitally, as paper archivists throw away some material. Cliff’s response was that storage costs are becoming so low that we should keep everything.
The four organizations undertaking the Study (Library of Congress - US, JISC - UK, Open Access to Knowledge Law Project - Australia, SURF Foundation - Netherlands) summarised their national situation, and Adrienne Muir (Loughborough university) provided a synthesis of the four national perspectives. Adrienne has done a good job, both on the UK section in the Study Report and on the conclusions and recommendations in the Report.
Either side of lunch various people reported on aspects of the preservation situation or on particular projects. Ben White of the British Library gave a very good talk, bringing in the importance of access to preserved content. Eileen Fenton of Portico also gave a good presentation.
The final session was entitled “Ideas for a path forward” and there was some consideration of the recommendations that are included at the end of the report which call for action to amend current positions on copyright law. Each of the national jurisdictions contain commentaries about their particular region but there has also been some attempt to consolidate recommendations where possible.
Neil Grindley / Fred Friend
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Impact du copyright sur la conservation numérique…
International study on the impact of copyright law on digital preservation (juillet 08) (pdf)
Un rapport conjoint de la Library of Congress, du JISC (Gde.-Bret.), de l’Open Access to Knowledge Law Project (Australie) et de la SURF Foundation (Pays-…
Well done to everyone involved …and very much looking forward to reading
(NB: link down)
Naomi