As part of its statutory duty to collect, preserve and provide access for the nation to a comprehensive archive of publications, the British Library spends around £16 million each year on the acquisition of commercial information resources, many of them digital, and is also the recipient of UK legal deposit including, in due course, digital legal deposit.
In addition to our collecting, we are also an active print and digital publisher in our own right, and thus have IP which we wish to protect in the national interest. We already have practical experience in the implementation of DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems and we have long enjoyed a reputation of “honest broker”, seeking to maintain an appropriate balance between maintenance of the public interest and respect for rightsholders. We have close links with the publishing industry.
Our written evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG), together with the evidence of other organisations and individuals, is expected to be published by the Group, alongside its own report, in April. In the meantime, our principal concerns relating to DRMs are as follows:
- We wish to ensure that the exceptions and limitations of copyright law, such as fair dealing and library privilege, which have long existed in the analogue environment, are not eroded, whether unintentionally or otherwise, in the digital arena. More generally, we believe there is a need to modernise copyright legislation for the digital age.
- It is essential that we ensure that DRMs cannot interfere with the responsibilities of the legal deposit libraries to acquire, store, preserve and give access to digital items in perpetuity. The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 already provides for the delivery by the publisher of “a copy of any computer program and any information necessary in order to access the work”. It would be preferable if publications came without any DRM wrapping. The Act does not explicitly provide for the circumvention of a DRM in the event of harvest from the Internet by a library.
- A number of non-legal deposit libraries have traditionally discharged a long-term preservation and access function. They will continue to do so, partly because they will collect some specialist resources not acquired by the legal deposit libraries, and partly because they will require for their users levels of online access which the legal deposit libraries may not be entitled to provide. It is thus essential that, over and above the legal deposit libraries, there is potential for recognising these other libraries as trusted intermediaries, to whom DRM keys should be passed under defined circumstances and to facilitate long-term preservation.
- DRMs are still in their relative infancy. Any particular DRM is likely to be short-lived. Thus DRMs are not easily susceptible to legislative regulation except at a very generic level. However, there does need to be an accepted and constantly revised code of practice for the design and operation of DRMs to ensure that they cannot constrain statutory rights in the form of exceptions and limitations of copyright.
- Finally, the British Library is a member of Share the Vision and attaches particular importance to addressing the needs of visually impaired users in the DRM world.
For further information, please contact:
Ben Sanderson at the British Library Press Office.
T: +44 (0)1937 546126
E: ben.sanderson@bl.uk
