Legal issues relating to the archiving of Internet resources in the UK, EU, USA and Australia: A study undertaken for the JISC and Wellcome Trust
Title
Legal issues relating to the archiving of Internet resources in the UK, EU, USA and Australia: A study undertaken for the JISC and Wellcome Trust
Subject
Copyright
Description
Andrew Charlesworth, senior research fellow in IT at the University of Bristol, reports on copyright permissions and legislation affecting the archiving of Internet sources in the UK, Europe, Australia, and the United States. In this report, Charlesworth identifies the national legal and technical responses for protecting intellectual property, and describes countermeasures taken by libraries and archives to obtain and open access to these Internet sources.
While Charlesworth notes that the U.S. system is both "pragmatic and confusing," he illuminates key issues for U.S. digital archivists and librarians including laws favoring primarily "physical" and "decisional" privacy rights. This translates into government protection mainly for individuals and not for third parties, such as libraries and archives. The principles of fair use and rights to create archival copies do not necessarily afford a web archive's right to preserve and disseminate web content. Charlesworth cites two major U.S. web archiving projects, the Library of Congress' "Minerva" and the Internet Archive. Although Minerva served primarily to gauge user response to a limited number of archived web sites, the Internet Archive continues to expand as it adheres to its mission to preserve all "publicly accessible materials displayed on the Internet." Charlesworth contrasts the lack of selection policy and surface web crawling against European and Australian more clearly defined guidelines and licensing options. The U.S. web archiving practices, indicated by Minerva and the Internet Archive, do not have clearly defined legal permissions and are thus vulnerable to legal redress as well as losing potentially valuable information in the "deep" (private) web.
While Charlesworth notes that the U.S. system is both "pragmatic and confusing," he illuminates key issues for U.S. digital archivists and librarians including laws favoring primarily "physical" and "decisional" privacy rights. This translates into government protection mainly for individuals and not for third parties, such as libraries and archives. The principles of fair use and rights to create archival copies do not necessarily afford a web archive's right to preserve and disseminate web content. Charlesworth cites two major U.S. web archiving projects, the Library of Congress' "Minerva" and the Internet Archive. Although Minerva served primarily to gauge user response to a limited number of archived web sites, the Internet Archive continues to expand as it adheres to its mission to preserve all "publicly accessible materials displayed on the Internet." Charlesworth contrasts the lack of selection policy and surface web crawling against European and Australian more clearly defined guidelines and licensing options. The U.S. web archiving practices, indicated by Minerva and the Internet Archive, do not have clearly defined legal permissions and are thus vulnerable to legal redress as well as losing potentially valuable information in the "deep" (private) web.
Creator
Charlesworth, Andrew
Publisher
Joint Information Systems Committee
Date
2003-02-25
Contributor
Polk, Victoria
Rights
CC BY-NC-ND
Type
Document
Identifier
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/archiving_legal.pdf
Bibliographic Citation
Charlesworth, Andrew. "Legal issues relating to the archiving of Internet resources in the UK, EU, USA and Australia: A study undertaken for the JISC and Wellcome Trust." Joint Information Systems Committee Ver 1.0 (2003). http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/archiving_legal.pdf
Files
Collection
Citation
Charlesworth, Andrew, “Legal issues relating to the archiving of Internet resources in the UK, EU, USA and Australia: A study undertaken for the JISC and Wellcome Trust,” Digital Archiving Resources, accessed April 20, 2024, https://dar.cah.ucf.edu/items/show/91.