The public domain

I'm probably the last person to blog on this, but what the hell, it's an interesting story. This is the case of copyright infringement by Cooks Source Magazine against Monica Gaudio, which I read about on the Techno Llama blog yesterday and find interesting for a couple reasons.

First, it's provided me, and probably many others, with some clarification of Internet copyright. This case raised the important question of what the public domain actually is. Stuart Karle at the Columbia School of Journalism put it very simply in a Techland news article: just like any published book, original material is within copyright throughout the lifetime of the author plus 70 years - you don't give up copyright just because you put something up on the Internet. As we've seen in many different contexts, you can believe that the digital world is as open as you like, but copyright will usually be there somewhere (this is also, incidentally, the exact same copyright specification that libraries face in digitising their collections).

Second, it's another good example of idea transfer via the Internet. Taking the Techno Llama blog title - Why sue when you can use social media? - it would seem that on balance the resulting Internet storm will be more damaging (at least psychologically) than a quiet settlement. It's difficult to quantify, but Cooks Source Magazine would probably have preferred straightforward litigation at this point. In any case, it seems that Gaudio's outcome was unintentional - it sounded as though she was looking for advice, albeit publicly, and the injustice was confirmed by mass consensus. Just as many people spend a lot of effort in trying to make their online content 'viral', it can also happen by accident. The plus side here is that probably everyone has a much better understanding of Internet copyright law than ever before, which might reduce the chances of further events of this nature, and make future arguments over copyright more clear-cut.

Collecting UK online publications

It's not difficult to understand why copyright concerns aren't always tackled in scoping documents concerning digital futures (as mentioned in the previous post) - the topic is big enough that it probably merits a report entirely to itself. One angle on the copyright issue is the question of legal deposit for UK online materials. The UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport recently ran a consultation on the Collection and Preservation of UK Online Publications, to which there were a number of responses from various institutions.

The general recommendation from the Legal Deposit Advisory Panel (LDAP) to the Secretary of State for Culture (currently, Jeremy Hunt) was regulation-based harvesting and archiving - the libraries have a legal entitlement to UK domain sites, though by the nature of the material in question, the libraries will need to collect (or harvest) these materials directly themselves. Incidentally, 'agents' are mentioned as harvesting material on the behalf of libraries, which continues the theme of third party involvement in matters concerning digital management.

One of the more interesting sections of the report is that covering policies for deposit, access and use (p. 31). Despite defining online content as "available free of charge and without access restrictions" throughout the report, the LDAP recommends that "access must be confined to readers (and staff) using terminals, screens or devices that are controlled by the Libraries, and whilst they are on the Libraries’ premises". This takes the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 (which aimed to encompass digital publications but not websites - the 2003 Act calls them 'non-print publications') and applies it in a literal fashion to all online content, resulting in an apparent contradiction.

Having said that, while I'm not sure how threatened libraries really are by a transition to digital, this level of restriction could empower them as gatekeepers to the most complete collection of archived web content available - after all, the websites would not have continued to exist without their intervention, the live web is not the same as a depository and there would be multiple access points to this content throughout the UK. However, the idea of taking something that was once "available free of charge and without access restrictions" and making access restrictive is probably too much of a leap.

So far, web archiving in the UK has been permissions-based, rather than regulation-based. While the precedent for web archiving operated under a much more restrictive model, it could easily allow free access to all. It will be interesting to see if re-writing the legislation to accommodate this (if indeed it is re-written, I believe that there is going to be a second round of consultation, which is a positive sign) requires a compromise between ease of harvesting (ideally, regulation-based) and ease of access (free for everyone, anywhere in the UK).