Central to all IPR is the notion of exchange: a balance between rewarding innovation and sharing knowledge, Benjamin White of the British Library told the Shaping the Future forum on February 19. But has that balance shifted towards the rights holders and away from the user? Read on to find out the British Library’s perspective on copyright and the Gowers review, and to see the slides from Ben’s presentation.
Central to all IPR is the notion of exchange: a balance between rewarding innovation and sharing knowledge. The British Library (BL) believes that this balance is essential to all our IPR in order to foster a healthy economy and support rights holders and also support learning and research.
The American constitution established 14 years of copyright which could be extended if the person was still alive. It is now life + 70, so well over 100 years.
The BL view is that there is now an imbalance in IPR from the perspective of the user – and it is getting worse through poor legislation such as digital rights management and the prospect of lengthening copyright duration.
The British Library IP manifesto
1. Digital is not different – exceptions should not be medium dependent
2. Fair dealing – copyright needs to be made more logical and balanced so that people understand and respect it
3. Archiving
4. Term of copyright – any change requires evidence in order to justify extensions
5. Orphan works
6. Unpublished works
Five principle of copyright have informed our copyright to date:
1. Public interest
2. Balance
3. Digital is not different
4. Law aligned with realities
5. Technology neutral – technology moves on so should not have no tech-specific constraints enshrined in legislation
Copyright is undermined by contract
BL estimates that 80% of officially published material will be available electronically, and by 2020, 40% exclusively electronic. When you take out a subscription to a database for an e-resource this is controlled by contract law rather than copyright. BL has millions of digital objects – contracts cannot be negotiated on this volume and is it even desirable to spend public money on legal negotiations when this is already provided for by copyright law in regards to analogue material?
Fair dealing
BL welcomes Gowers Recommendation 9 to allow private copying for non-commercial research to cover all forms of content (extend literary artistic works to cover sounds, film and broadcast) and Gowers Recommendation 2: to enable educational provisions to cover distance learning and interactive white boards. However, recommendation 9 will have little efficacy unless it is extended to allow librarians to facilitate it given that a lot of this material is in specialist institutions.
Archiving exception
At the moment we can make a single copy for archival purposes and the accepted medium is microfilm but, in digital world, although we still want microfilm copy we also want to be able to create digital surrogates. That requires mirror servers, different locations, format shifting and so on and so we need to be able to create more than one copy and be able to format shift and would also like the right to archive sound, film and broadcast.
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