British Library Legal deposit and web archiving | Hacker News Reader

British Library Legal deposit and web archiving

bl.uk

37 pointsrobtherobber16 comments

The important thing here is that the British Library has a copy of all the published books, magazines, etc from the UK.

When I self published my book with a physical print, I was required to submit a copy to them free of charge. Which I’m proud to have contributed to. Naturally I don’t want it accessible to all, hence the reading room requirement.

I remember them launching the web archive as an extension of this as a lot of human knowledge has moved online. So yes it feels weird you can only retrieve it from their reading room, but in the context of them having access to physical copyrighted material, it does make more sense.

Crawling and storing a complete copy of the internet is rather expensive. But a thing worth doing if there is benefit now or in the future to the people of the UK (who are paying the bill).

Yet by restricting to physical access in one room, most likely very few people benefit and I wonder if it is good value for money for the taxpayer.

Well, that "How we identify UK sites" should be "How we define a UK site".

I have a server hosted in UK by a US company, being a resident and a citizen of neither...

There's three other signifiers listed besides being hosted in the UK - do any of those apply to your site?

I think that to identify something one should define it first. That article fails to make a difference.

What's the difference? If the UK wants to archive your website it can do so, it's public.

Of course that's true.

But it's still bizarre for a legacy entity like a nation state to presume that it can identify an internet phenomenon without first explaining what it even means when declaring its intention to do so.

However, it may be and in most cases is probably still copyrighted (with some exceptions such as US government content). Archiving is probably OK in most cases. Making that archive available to the public (e.g. Wayback Machine) is something that gets a blind eye turned on but there's probably not much legal backing for that--and which, to date, pretty much no one has wanted to try to build a legal case around.

It's not legal in the UK to make a copy of a website except if you're a deposit library and the website fails within the strictures of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003.

But, under that act, if it's hosted in the UK then BL can make a copy (for access in person by someone visiting the physical library).

UK law is pretty draconian, in my personal opinion, when it comes to copyright.

> It's not legal in the UK to make a copy of a website except if [...]

Can you cite a source for this? It sounds wrong to me.

What you've identified is the looming great conflict of the coming decades. Legacy states presume that the internet regards reality on their terms.

If states want to legislate internet objects, they first need to very clearly explain how they define the objects which they regard as being within their purview.

The idea that the internet transcends material and social realities and that nations are now irrelevant seems like a pretty old-fashioned idea at this point.

Not as old-fashioned as the idea of "legacy states" for sure but perhaps less able to withstand the test of time.

The state doesn't like to consider anything as beyond their purview.

I myself have a site that has no particular UK content, not a .uk domain, not owned or operated by any person or business or other organization in the UK, but the physical hosting server is in the UK. It's public info and I actually want it copied as much as possible, but that's just lucky.

They didn't say but they must mean the items in the identifiers list must be ANDed.

Take the inverse of your case: Anyone can put up a site with content about the UK that isn't hosted in the UK nor owned by anyone living or operating in the UK. That meets one of the stated criteria. Does that give them the right to archive it?

That immediatly just exposes that there are bigger questions we have yet to figure out before we can answer that one. The entire premis of copyright broke a long time ago once the definitions of "copy", "redistribute", and "view" became vague, which happened once "view" started taking place via the technological means of sending a copy to you.

You could always resell a paper book. You could always lend a book that you already read, meaning multiple people get to read the same book.

Could you sell access to your private library?

Could you rent out a book? That's what Blockbuster did, but IDK if they maybe had some extra voluntary private agreements with publishers to keep them from trying to shut them down or inhibit their ability to aquire inventory, seperately from what might have been strictly legal obligation.

So with all of that actually still up in the air, it's hard to say if they have the right to archive anything on the internet that simply references the UK, or even stuff that is primarily about the UK. Many people publicly display things that they claim to retain copyright to, so they would argue that merely existing in public view on the internet does not grant anyone else the right to do anything but view it, and only grudgingly allow that most laws in most places also allow people to retain their own personal copy.

But if I view a public site and cache a copy on my laptop and don't re-publish that anywhere, I may still let 10 people come into my house and look at my screen. Though I think charging money for that is covered, like with bars with a cover charge and pay-per-view sports.

If I can cache any site I can see, and even let anyone else look at my cached copy, then how do you disallow the British Library from doing it?

So maybe in fact they didn't mean for the points to all be ANDed, and maybe in fact they do intend to copy anything from anywhere published by anyone if it merely references the UK in any way?

But if they are ANDed, then merely meeting any one condition, or even meeting all but missing only one, means they don't consider the site to qualify.

All in all it sounds like an underspecced undefined mess.

It's quite funny; they archive my site but I can't read it except in one of their two physical reading rooms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com