High time to change copyright laws
Jinfo Blog

14th June 2010

By Penny Crossland

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The British Library’s announcement of its ambitious programme to digitize the UK’s newspaper collection (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29096) was swiftly followed by an attack from James Murdoch, accusing the organization of exploiting news which publishers were obliged to hand over in the first place, for commercial gain. The newspaper archive was built upon a law, which permitted the British Library to demand copies of every printed newspaper in the UK. Once digitized, the archive will be available to the public as a paid-for service. As The Guardian reported (http://digbig.com/5bbspw) , Murdoch Junior argued that not unlike search engines (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27361 and http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27220 for NewsCorp’s battle with Google), the British Library will be offering access to their archives at a low cost and damaging the newspaper industry in the process. Countering the argument that the archive is being made available for easier access by the public to historical information, Murdoch claimed that the ultimate aim was commercial gain and increased public funding. According to the Guardian, James Murdoch was “very, very concerned about some of the approaches that they (the British Library) seem to be taking. But at the same time there is a dialogue with the library about it." Is NewsCorp heading for another spat on a different front? Murdoch’s argument that creative ownership, protected by copyright laws, should extend to the digital sphere has led to a debate in the press as to whether laws passed in the 18th century (i.e. the 1710 Statute of Anne, the first ever piece of copyright legislation) can be applied to the fast-moving technical world we live in today. Some commentators maintain that the Murdochs have got it wrong – again – (http://digbig.com/5bbspx ), with the argument being that copyright is more than a legal instrument – it needs to be interpreted within a technological context. Dr Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute (http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk) makes a valid point when he says that the existing copyright laws cannot be applied to our current digital times. Instead, he argues that copyright should be changed to allow users to copy, but to prevent them from selling copies on. This would re-interpret the law as providing an ”exclusive right to commercialise, rather than to copy”. Meanwhile, the British Library, wary of the minefield surrounding NewsCorp’s publications, is currently only digitizing newspapers that were published before 1900, for which copyright has run out. Minus the Times archive, that is, since that archive has already been digitized by the publisher and is made available to the British Library for a fee. Do you get the feeling that we are swinging around in circles here?

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