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Law Prevents British Websites From Being Archived

Posted by timothy on from the there-would-be-these-things-called-hard-drives dept.

Lanxon writes "The law that allows the US Internet Archive to collect and preserve websites does not apply to British archivists. In fact, experts from the Archive and many other archivist institutions argue that the only way the millions of Britain's websites could be legally archived is if British law itself was amended, reports Wired in an investigation published today. Currently, archivists have to seek permission from webmasters of every single site before they are able to take snapshots and retain data."

3 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. They already ask everyone... by mjperson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the article:

    "The team currently has to contact the copyright holder of every website it wants to archive and this process has just a 24 percent response rate."

    Actually, I'd say they have almost a 100% response rate. They ask the copyright holder, "May I please have a copy of your content?" and in most cases, they receive a response within 500 milliseconds saying, "Sure! Here it is!"

  2. Re:Google FTW by MichaelSmith · · Score: 5, Funny

    Google is so going to gaol.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  3. Utterly nonsensical summary by martin-boundary · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The summary is utterly nonsensical. The US Internet Archive referred to in the summary is US-based, and the laws that apply to it are US laws, not British laws. That means there's no issue for the US IA.

    In fact, TFA talks about a different organization, the UK Internet Archive, which is presumably based in the UK and under UK jurisdiction. The British laws affect the UK IA, not the US IA.