Wednesday, 31 October 2007
With no fanfare (and I mean no fanfare: no press release at all; I found out via the Australian Copyright Council website), the Attorney-General’s Department and the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts have issued a Discussion Paper on the Extension of Legal Deposit in Australia to include audio-visual materials and electronic materials.
The submission date is 11 January 2008, and the Discussion Paper is available from both the DCITA and AG’s websites.
The Legal Deposit scheme requires Australian publishers of ‘library material’ (all paper-based publications – books, sheet music, periodicals, pamphlets) to deposit copies of that material with the National Library of Australia. It doesn’t require deposit of films, sound recordings, or other materials in electronic form, including web material or e-books. (although the penalty – all of $100 – for failure to comply isn’t all that scary).
The purpose is to develop a public collection of published material, so as to preserve national heritage and provide access for research purposes. This stuff is actually quite important (particularly for people like me, but also from a policy perspective).
But of course legal deposit does become trickier when you move to electronic materials. Do we want to preserve every website? Really? Even the teenager’s blog? When? (websites change!) Maybe instead we should go for representative samples? If so, how do we judge what is ‘representative’? And how do you make stuff accessible? If it is preserved electronically, should it be made available online? To whom? On what basis? If you are a public institution responsible for this, do you depend on commercial products to continue their commercial way, and try to fill the gaps? What if the commercial publisher stops providing a service? Really, really interesting questions.
For convenience, a full list of the questions in the review is reproduced over the fold.
- Should the legal deposit scheme be extended to audiovisual and electronic materials and, if so, how should such materials be defined (including the quality of legal deposit materials, such as the ‘best copy’)?
- Should an extended legal deposit scheme be in the Copyright Act 1968 or is a separate piece of legislation more appropriate?
- How many copies of published material should a publisher be required to deposit under an extended legal deposit scheme?
- Should the existing requirement that material be deposited at the publisher’s expense continue to apply under an extended legal deposit scheme?
- Should there be a role for other organisations, in addition to the NLA and NFSA, to act as repositories for material under an extended legal deposit scheme?
- How might duplication of material collected by legal deposit agencies be avoided? For example, should publishers be required to deposit relevant material with more than one institution?
- Should an extended legal deposit scheme apply to electronic versions of printed material?
- What other material should an extended legal deposit scheme apply to?
- Should an extended legal deposit scheme apply to broadcasts? If so should this be limited to any particular types of material? Should the scheme apply to internet material hosted in Australia?
- Should an extended legal deposit scheme apply to internet material hosted outside Australia and in what situations?
- In light of the existing provisions in the Copyright Act, is there a need for any additional provisions to ensure the safe storage and preservation of legal deposit materials?
- What approach, comprehensive, selective or hybrid, should be used for collection of materials under an extended legal deposit scheme? Should ‘significance’, say to Australian audiences, be the basis of any extension of legal deposit? Should online and offline material be treated differently and if so, on what basis?
- What timeframe should apply for deposit under an extended legal deposit scheme? Is the timeframe for deposit suggested by the CLRC appropriate in the context of a selective approach to extending legal deposit? Should different time frames apply to the deposit of different published materials if legal deposit is extended?
- In light of the recent amendments to the technological protection measure provisions in the Copyright Act, are any additional provisions required to ensure access to materials deposited under an extended legal deposit scheme? Should publishers be required to ensure that the copy of published material provided under an extended legal deposit scheme will be accessible?
- On what basis, if any, should access be restricted to material deposited under an extended legal deposit scheme?
- Under any extended legal deposit scheme should legal deposit materials be subject to separate provisions concerning their use by the repository institution and the public? What kind of provisions are desirable to ensure that repository institutions can provide the public with adequate access to legal deposit materials under any extended scheme?
- Are there any other issues that you consider relevant to the extension of the legal deposit scheme?
Bookmark or share this story:
Del.icio.us | 
Digg | 
Reddit | 
ma.gnolia.com | 
Newsvine | 
furl |
Technorati | 
IceRocket | 
PubSub | 
Google | 
Yahoo
3 Responses to “Preserving our electronic heritage? Australia reviews legal deposit arrangements”
Leave a Reply
Do not post material that is defamatory or obscene, that infringes any third party's copyrights, trademarks or other proprietary rights, or that violates any other right of any other person.
We reserve the right to remove or edit any comment for any reason.
Note: Posting more than two links in a comment may cause it not to appear because it will be submitted for moderation. Also, links in comments will not be counted by Google, so spamming is pointless.
Posts
Comments
Posts
November 8th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Good morning, Kim.
Maybe the easiest way to answer most of the questions would be for the Deposit Scheme to contract with Google and the Wayback Machine?
Or would that be surrendering to the Evil One?
Paul
November 8th, 2007 at 9:21 am
The WayBack Machine point is an interesting one. What I’d like to see is some kind of comparison between the National Library’s Pandora Project (which has sought to do some archiving of web-based Australian materials) and the WayBack machine of the Internet Archive. It would be great to have some idea of the coverage of the Internet Archive, and whether the Internet Archive could be a kind of substitute/adjunct to Australia-based materials. It is exactly that kind of debate that we need to have, I think.
As for Google – well, again, that is an interesting question. I’m not sure what their archiving arrangements are: how long they are preserved, how accessible they are, etc etc etc. But again, that is the kind of conversation we should have.
In either case, if you wanted to rely on parties like these, what you need to think about is:
(a) Whether you need an adjunct which is Australian-based and focused on Australian materials, and made accessible to Australians and Australian researchers; and
(b) Whether you need arrangements with the third parties, so that you have both information about their practices (that can be made available to researchers seeking to use the materials) and prior warning of changes to practices.
There are particular difficulties with these issues, I suspect, when it comes to dealing with third parties because of the various issues of commercial/trade secrecy. Government bodies, when they collect information, have to have some measure of transparency. Google and other such third parties do not. That’s why there is increasing interest in the US regarding ‘search engine law’ – see here and here.
December 6th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Hi Kim,
Those of us with a libertarian gene (bend, leaning, quirk?) would say the reason governments need at least some measure of transparency built into the law is because of the the power to become completely opaque.
Opacity becomes a measure of the government’s leanings towards totalitarian ideals. – Howard’s coalition was in power long enough to forget that intuitive measure of the quality of government…
My opinion is that Google and the other search engines should be contracted as primary sources for this sort of information.
If there has to be a colloquial Australian source, all that’s needed is a copy maintained within the borders of Australia. Any conflicts will open a healthy and very democratic debate that may prevent future opacities evolving.
Australian researchers and all Australians would have access to both sources.
There is no real difficulty here. As you’ve mentioned many times, regional zoning is already in place; and searches are filtered via IP address, DNS zones (.com vs .com.au, etc.) The process seems like a simple exercise in funding.
Since the advent of Google-Australia, Yahoo7, and NineMSN the storage space is already available configured.
The only reason for chauvinized resources is to control access for Australians to information.
Let the government or military maintain what information is needed as they see fit; as will many large corporations. To assume such information is valuable to the wider range of researchers and the public is to limit the viewport for all Australians.
The larger corporations will have better information anyway.
Australia is a tiny portion of the Internet. No matter what the terms, the value of this country is determined by its relationships with other nations.
Did you know that during the ‘Roaring 20s’, America called itself the Lucky Country? It was an almost identical isolationist rational in both countries.
Paul