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.
Its legally required, but in practice a large amount of publishers do not submit a copy, and there are no real consequences for not following the law.
This illegal non compliance becomes much more common in expensive books, digital-only publishers and in data publications which are commercial.
E.g. think of some very expensive report on data centres aimed at the hedge fund trading market, government procurement datasets, geodemographic data, credit risk databases, bloomburg trading data etc.
If it's published, even if it costs a lot, it should all be viewable for free in the library.
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.
> UK websites are collected and preserved under legal deposit legislation, which does not allow the Legal Deposit Libraries to make most archived websites freely available online.
Having the thing at all is valuable. The legislation provides a very limited exemption to IP law to allow archiving. Future legislators can work out how to loosen restrictions if its valuable to do so.
The BL is not after my site specifically. It is after all sites it "sees" as "UK sites". All I am asking is a definition of what is a UK site.
I am asking for such a definition not because I object to archiving but because placement of my site into a collection of "UK sites" is an obvious mis-classification.
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.
In the UK most copies are outlawed. There are explicit exceptions for things like internet caches and the transient copies made by routers. The fact the exceptions are needed shows how restrictive the law is.
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.
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.
It seems to me to be a temporary artifact of the closed/corporate social slop that has come be to the face of the internet lately.
But in 1,000 years, I'm pretty confident that the internet (whether it consists of AI or humans or both) will revere The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (and The Grateful Dead more generally) and will regard Meta and Tiktok as footnotes.
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.
How does that work? Does the BL provide terminals to interact with the content? How does 3D content or audio content work? Are there headsets provided?
Or do they provide a wifi and the “borrower” provides the device? Which then allows the borrower to “illegally” take the content with them?
I wonder whether it would be possible to create a website that could only be accessed after being archived, ie in the BLs reading room!
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.
This illegal non compliance becomes much more common in expensive books, digital-only publishers and in data publications which are commercial.
E.g. think of some very expensive report on data centres aimed at the hedge fund trading market, government procurement datasets, geodemographic data, credit risk databases, bloomburg trading data etc.
If it's published, even if it costs a lot, it should all be viewable for free in the library.
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.
Having the thing at all is valuable. The legislation provides a very limited exemption to IP law to allow archiving. Future legislators can work out how to loosen restrictions if its valuable to do so.
Not providing wider access can be changed at any point in the future, so it is only 'lost' now.
I have a server hosted in UK by a US company, being a resident and a citizen of neither...
I am asking for such a definition not because I object to archiving but because placement of my site into a collection of "UK sites" is an obvious mis-classification.
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.
Can you cite a source for this? It sounds wrong to me.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/I/chapter/...
But yes, it's an allowlist rather than a reasonableness test. The US 4 point test is somewhat decent in this regard.
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.
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.
Not as old-fashioned as the idea of "legacy states" for sure but perhaps less able to withstand the test of time.
But in 1,000 years, I'm pretty confident that the internet (whether it consists of AI or humans or both) will revere The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (and The Grateful Dead more generally) and will regard Meta and Tiktok as footnotes.
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.
Or do they provide a wifi and the “borrower” provides the device? Which then allows the borrower to “illegally” take the content with them?
I wonder whether it would be possible to create a website that could only be accessed after being archived, ie in the BLs reading room!