Hadopi Says French National Library Needs Unprotected Works... To Put Its Own DRM On

from the locking-up-culture dept

In the past, many have noted that proprietary formats for content almost guarantee that certain works will be lost to history. Backwards compatibility becomes a problem, and before long content that could be accessed by tons of programs may be impossible to open just a few years later. For libraries and archvists this is a huge problem -- and it's made even worse when you add DRM to the mix. It appears that even the "anti-piracy" folks in France recognize this, but only to a limited extent.

According to the French publication, Numerama, Hadopi (the agency in charge of stamping out infringement in France), has published an opinion in which it suggests that content creators give the French National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale de France or BNF) works without any DRM on them. As they quite rightly note, in order to better make sure that the culture is preserved and that future archives are accessible, a lack of DRM makes much more sense. They even note that just providing a DRM'd copy with the keys to decrypt it, or with circumvention tools, really isn't sufficient for proper archiving.

That said, the report also then appears to fret about the BNF leaking these unprotected works out into the world. The suggestion seems to be that (wait for it...) the BNF then create its own DRM to lock up the unprotected works that it needs to keep them from getting locked up. In other words, the whole plan is pretty useless anyway.

This is just an opinion, and not binding in any way. So apparently the French government is still considering what sorts of requirements it intends to put on submissions to the BNF, but once again it seems like an overly aggressive "fear of piracy" may actually lead to some bad technical decisions for the sake of "protecting" some works against infringement.

Filed Under: access, archives, copyright, drm, france, hadopi, library, locked up
Companies: bnf, hadopi

Why The Internet Archive Says It Can Show You Every TV News Program

from the and-why-the-tv-news-guys-may-disagree dept

Like many folks, I saw the news today about the always-wonderful Internet Archive offering up a treasure trove of TV news broadcasting and thought it was a great thing. They're basically making available every TV news recording they could get from 2009 forward, including all of the major TV networks, the news channels (CNN, Fox News, etc.), etc. They'll also have a bunch of local TV broadcasts as well, which is cool. All in all, it's launching with 350,000 clips. They'll even have recordings of The Daily Show as a part of the archive -- which seems fitting, since Internet Archive mastermind Brewster Kahle noted that with this collection, they can "let a thousand Jon Stewarts bloom" by letting them find interesting (or contradictory) news clips.

You can go check out the TVNews Search & Borrow site right now. The search feature is pretty cool, combing through closed captions to find the relevant content. So it's neat to do a quick search on topics of interest and see what they turn up. Of course, there are still a few kinks to work out. Out of curiosity, I did a search on SOPA, and got back some relevant news stories (including the Jon Stewart story about blackout day. But... I also got a bunch of Spanish-language programs about soup. Even when I limited the language to English. I assume those things will get better over time. Each clip is split into 30 second increments, so it's not like you're automatically getting the full broadcast, though you can piece together the clips.

And it's not just a "historical" archive. They're going to continue to add to it, with new clips being available 24-hours after they air.

Of course, all of this made me wonder about the copyright issues involved. The NY Times had this somewhat cryptic statement:

The act of copying all this news material is protected under a federal copyright agreement signed in 1976. That was in reaction to a challenge to a news assembly project started by Vanderbilt University in 1968.

I was curious about that, and a few people pointed me to 17 USC 108 (f)(3), which notes that:

nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the reproduction by lending of a limited number of copies and excerpts by a library or archives of an audiovisual news program subject to [a few other clauses concerning archives]...

This is based on the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, which the Internet Archive directly calls out in its own announcement as being the inspiration for this new project. Inspiration... and legal helper.

Here's a bit of historical perspective from Historians.org:

Indeed, in the early days of the archive, CBS had sued for copyright infringement, claiming that broadcasts could not be recorded without the permission of the networks. At the time of the lawsuit, Congress was in the process of revising the copyright law. Congress recognized the growing importance and influence of television media on American culture, thought, and politics, and felt that news broadcasts should have special protection under the copyright law, to allow the American people access to their own history. Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee introduced an amendment to the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act to give universities and archives the right to record news broadcasts off-air and to make a limited number of copies for research purposes. Following the enactment of the new law with this provision, CBS and Vanderbilt mutually withdrew from the lawsuit.

But does that really make the Internet Archive legal? I'm not so sure the TV guys are going to see it that way. That same report at Historians.org notes that Vanderbilt is not allowed to share nearly all of its collection online -- and it also notes that "The advent of the Internet and the consequent possibility of making digital copies and lending them online have, however, raised new legal problems that need to be resolved." I would imagine that a key one among them is whether or not the Internet Archives' setup qualifies as "lending a limited number of copies."

One would hope that an informed court would recognize that this fits with the intent of Congress in creating this kind of exception, though I fear that the networks are likely to fight pretty hard on this one, even as it seems like this service could really benefit them as well as others, rather than really take away from anything they do.

Filed Under: archives, broadcasts, copyright, exceptions, tv news
Companies: internet archive

Celebrity Photographer's Archivist Connects With Fans On Reddit Instead Of Freaking Out

from the that's-how-it's-done dept

When a person's whole job revolves around managing and licensing a catalogue of copyrights, it's hardly surprising (if still disappointing) when they freak out about unauthorized sharing. So it's really nice to see someone in that exact position taking the opposite tack, as recently happened when a comparative Then & Now photo of Meryl Streep (which demonstrates that she may be some kind of magical ageless faerie) shot up the Reddit charts (thanks to Andy for sending this in):

The 1979 photo is by famous pioneer-paparazzo Ron Gelella. The archive director for the company that manages his copyrights saw the image and showed up in the Reddit comments... with additional info and a link to related photos. This garnered a very positive reaction from the community:

As you can see, this prompted an AMA, which is interesting in itself, featuring lots of conversation about how the internet has changed the paparazzi business and the differences between modern paparazzi and early ones like Gelella.

I wouldn't be surprised if all this exposure led to some print sales for the company—though what would be really cool is if they started working on some additional interesting offerings. There is apparently a huge amount of interest in Gelella's photography and perhaps even more in his anecdotes, not to mention a lot of people who want to jump into the moral debate surrounding the paparazzi. The archivist is clearly skilled at connecting with fans, and I bet they can come up with some great reasons to buy, too.

Filed Under: archives, connect with fans, licensing, meryl streep, paparazzi, reddit, ron gelella

Old News Can Be Good News For Media Sites

from the if-they-recognized-it dept

One strategy we've seen some media sites use over the years for their web properties is to lock up the "archives" and charge for access to it, on the assumption that if people want to see old stories, there must be some reason, for which they'd be willing to spend. Separately, many media properties assume that the only thing that really matters for generating traffic is the "breaking news." There's so much emphasis on "the scoop" and "being first," and very little emphasis on the follow through. It turns out, that may be a pretty big mistake. Chas Edwards highlights how some newspapers are discovering, to their own surprise, that old news can get an awful lot of traffic from social media sharing:

Apparently London’s Independent, as it rolled out the Open Graph, learned that several quirky stories from the late 1990s are the most shared stories of the early 2010s. (More data here.) If news publishers are sitting a goldmine of buried archival content, imagine the opportunity for publishers outside the breaking-news category if they can figure out how to resurface those great stories from last month, last year, or a decade ago.

This is actually something we've been really interested in lately. We see it happen quite frequently with our own archives. Suddenly, for no clear reason, a story from years ago will become wildly popular on Twitter or Facebook, and we'll get a ton of useful traffic. In fact, we made this point back in January, when we dug into "the numbers" from 2011 and discovered that our most popular post in 2011... was actually from 2010. It will be interesting to see if publishers can start to figure out ways to do more with "old news" rather than just assigning it to the "discarded" pile. I know it's an area that we're planning to explore more deeply in the coming months, so it's interesting to see others thinking along similar lines.

Filed Under: archives, business models, journalism, paywalls, traffic

Dear Internet, We Need Better Image Archives

from the The-Public-Domain-should-be-Public dept

Cross-posted from ninapaley.com

Dear Internet,

You know what should be really easy to find online? Good quality, Public Domain vintage illustrations. You know, things like this:



I found this on Flickr, where someone claims full copyright on it. That's copyfraud, but understandable because Flickr's default license is full copyright (all the more reason to ignore copyright notices!). But copyfraud isn't not the main problem. The main problem is that images like this are painfully difficult to find online, especially at high resolutions (and this image is only available at medium resolution - up to 604 pixels high, which is barely usable for most purposes but higher than much of what you find online).

The images are out there - and with zillions of antique books being scanned, their vintage illustrations are being scanned right along with them. But the images are buried in the text, and often the scan quality is poor. Images should be scanned at high quality, and tagged for searchability.

Are archives ignoring the value of images?

Take the American Memory archive of the Library of Congress. Lots and lots of historical documents here, but no way for me to find an image of, say, a horse.

Most book-scanning projects focus on texts, not illustrations. Many interesting and useful illustrations are buried within these scans, uncatalogued and inaccessible. Scan quality is set for text, not illustrations, so even if one can find a choice illustration buried within, its quality is usually too low to use.

Archive.org is great (I love you, archive.org!) but does not have an image archive. Still images are not among their "Media Types" (which consist of Moving Images, Texts, Audio, Software, and Education). So I went spelunking through their texts, starting with "American Libraries," and searched for something easy: "horse." Surely I could find a nice usable etching of a horse in there somewhere. I eventually found "The Harness Horse" by Sir Walter Gilbey, from 1898.



Nice illustrations! Can I use them? Unfortunately, no. The book is downloadable as PDF and various e-publication formats, but when I try to extract the illustrations, I get a mess (which you can see, after the jump):

Filed Under: archives, images, public domain

How Important Is It To Preserve Our Digital Heritage?

from the the-archive-team-at-work dept

Having recently been part of an effort to preserve videos on Google Video, in light of its announced shutdown, it's made me more aware how brittle our current culture is, with many many artifacts available only in digital form. There are conservation efforts such as the aforementioned one, part of a larger group called Archive Team. Google changed its mind and promised to keep Google Video online and try to move as much as possible to YouTube where it has permission from the original uploader. This is, obviously, a win for the archivists, who kept the effort going just the same and are still in the process of uploading all of Google Video to archive.org.

Contrast this with Friendster, where the Archive Team project was unable to save everything before the end of May, when everything was set to be deleted. Much has been downloaded and it will still give a good picture of what this early social network was like. Similarly, the Archive Team was able to rescue much, but not all of GeoCities, before Yahoo shut that down last year, releasing its collection as a massive 1 TB bittorrent file.

Now you may ask yourself is Friendster (or even GeoCities) worth saving? Answering that question purely myself, I'd say no, but I have no connection with those sites. Looking at the question however from the perspective of people who have spent many hours building these profiles and interacting with each other, I can see there's clearly value there to those who used them. Answering instead as someone with a deep interest in history, it's not for us to say what will eventually prove worth saving. Instead, that's something for the historians, archeologists, sociologists and other interested parties in the future to decide. But they can't do that if the information isn't even there.

How often have we not wished more of a particular point in our history had been preserved? Ironically many of the analog writings of our past are in a better state than some of our digital ones, even when it's often pointed out how easy it is to make bit-perfect copies of something in this day and age.

All of this, leads me to ask the following questions:

• Do you agree the digital aspects of our culture should be better preserved?
  
• Should we have, maybe even one on each continent or in each country, a modern Library of Alexandria? (identical copies in different places to prevent 'a fire' from destroying it)
  
• What would such a world-wide archival effort look like, technologically?
  
• What should we do about copyrights and patents (and DRM) that might get in the way of preserving our heritage?
  
• How do we go about archiving software for a computer that's available only in a museum, to preserve interactive access?
  
• What about the proliferation of file formats? Do we transform everything into a canonical form where we can, or do we store the original along with software to interpret?
  

I think we owe it to ourselves that this generation doesn't look like a black hole when viewed from the future, and by extension, I'd like to make it easier on future historians to learn about us than it has been for us to learn about previous societies (e.g. Sumerians).

I'll start off by saying that though little personal correspondence has been preserved of earlier times, we should recognize the right to privacy and any such posited archive would be allowed to include private communications only if you explicitly opted in. Valuable though these are for historians, if we preserve as much as we can of the digital domain, enough can be inferred from context that this would be an unwarranted intrusion.

But what about the wider issue of preservation of public content that can be wiped out by shutting off a power switch?

Filed Under: archives, culture, preserving

While BBC Wants To Kill Off A Bunch Of Websites, Geeks Quickly Archive Them

from the internet-to-the-rescue dept

Last month, the BBC announced its intention to kill off a bunch of websites, including Douglas Adams' old stomping grounds, H2G2. Apparently some of the sites were going to be archived, and others weren't -- but as you may know, the BBC does not have the greatest of reputations when it comes to archiving old material. However, this is the internet. If someone announces they are going to get rid of something that other people would like saved, there are tools to save it. Glyn Moody points us to a note from Ben Goldacre about how some "anonymous nerd" archived all of the sites the BBC is set to take down (it cost him a whopping $3.99) and he's now set that archive free, so you, too, can help make sure this content lives on. The whole thing is available via a torrent file at http://178.63.252.42/, which also has a description of the project, so have at it.

Filed Under: archives, bbc

Historical Audio Recordings Disappearing; Copyright Partly To Blame

from the yet-again... dept

Recently, we pointed out that various film archives were disintegrating, and noting that perverse copyright laws were partly to blame. Now, Copycense points us to the news that experts are also quite worried about audio recordings degrading and disappearing -- including recent recordings, such as from 9/11 and the 2008 election. This is part of a study commissioned by the Library of Congress -- so it's not just some random researchers. Thankfully (unlike the article on films) the study and the reporting about it highlights the copyright issue:

A hodgepodge of 20th century state anti-piracy laws also has kept most sound files out of the public domain before U.S. copyright law was extended to sound recordings in 1972. The study found only 14 percent of commercially released recordings are available from rights holders. That limits how much preservation can be accomplished, Brylawski said.

The full study (The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age (pdf)) suggests that copyright laws be changed to deal with the archival problem. The study mentions the famous (and mostly ignored) UK Gowers study that found that extending copyright was a mistake (Gowers later admitted, separate from the report, that the economic evidence clearly indicated copyright terms should be shortened). The study also quotes many researchers, academics and archivists who point out how copyright law has made it quite difficult for them to do basic research and other useful things without violating the law.

While fair use is frequently invoked, there is little case law interpreting its application to specific situations. Some archivists believe the lack of applicable case law discourages institutional general counsels from authorizing preservation and access programs on the basis of fair use. Fair-use provisions in the copyright law (Section 107) permit use of excerpts of copyrighted materials, including recordings, for educational and scholarly purposes, for citation in news reporting and criticism, and for nonprofit activities. However, the courts have interpreted fair use to be an affirmative defense. In other words, the burden is on the defendant to prove fair use; the plaintiff does not need to establish that the use falls outside fair use. Besek further notes that "favored uses are not automatically deemed fair, and other uses are not automatically unfair. The determination depends on the facts of a particular case."

Most witnesses at the hearings conducted in support of this study who were affiliated with educational institutions expressed a belief that copyright law as it applies to sound recordings is too complex to interpret easily, too restrictive, or both. Section 108, for example, which limits access to digital copies made available under that section to library premises, is too narrow to address all educational needs. One witness called for "premises" to be expanded to include network domain, in order to accommodate "the manner in which students and scholars use information in the current academic and scholarly environment. Increasingly, learning is occurring off-site, that is, at home, in the dorm or just anywhere on campus, in addition to the classroom and library."

Separately, the report notes that DRM and the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision is a real problem for researchers and archivists.

In the end, the study says that copyright law needs to change to deal with this very real challenge:

Creation of new copyright laws or licensing procedures that acknowledge best practices in audio preservation and assure access to audio heritage is essential to ensure the preservation of that heritage and its understanding and appreciation by generations to come.

It then repeats five suggestions made by The Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), such as changing the fact that pre-1972 recordings are all limited under ancient state laws, rather than federal copyright law (meaning they won't be in the public domain for much, much, much longer than more modern recordings). They also suggest moving copyright term back (just slightly) to 50 or 75 years, supporting orphan works legislation, enabling compulsory licensing to copyright holders for anyone wishing to reissue "abandoned" recordings and allowing non-profits to backup and archive sound recordings without violating copyright. The recommendations are, frankly, a bit weak, but in an era where the government only seems to want to strengthen copyright, it's nice to see at least some effort to push back in some areas. Of course, the likelihood of the Library of Congress actually following through on any of these recommendations seems slim at best.

Filed Under: archives, copyright, history

A Real Copyright Problem In The UK: The Difficulty Of Archiving Important Websites

from the fair-use-is-important dept

While UK politicians are arguing over a ridiculous and unnecessary change to copyright law as part of the Digital Economy Bill, it appears there's a much bigger problem with UK copyright law that isn't getting very much attention at all. Slashdot points us to the news that due to the way copyright law currently works in the UK, archiving websites without permission is illegal. Yes, even for the British Library and other institutions who are designated by law to keep a copy of every printed publication. But when it comes to the web, the Library needs to get permission from every website that it wishes to archive. Obviously, that greatly limits the archival activity that the Library can be involved in -- and, as a result, the public suffers greatly. This is a clear case where fair use should cover the issues, but current law does not adequately handle this. Making fair use work better should be a priority -- but instead we have politicians trying to prop up Hollywood's business model by pushing copyright law in the other direction.

Filed Under: archives, copyright, uk

The Economist Brings Back Its Paywall... Perhaps It Should Hire An Economist

from the missing-the-point dept

A bunch of folks have sent in the news that the Economist appears to be putting up something of a paywall, locking up all archival content older than 90 days, while also locking up one version of the magazine (the one that is made to look just like the physical paper layout). I have to be honest: I don't see how this makes any sense at all. In our experience, somewhere between 25% to 30% of our daily traffic is to archival content, usually in the form of search engine traffic -- or occasionally other sites picking up on an older story. Archival content is perfect Google fodder, driving traffic (and ad views) to pages that otherwise would get no traffic at all. In many ways, that's a big part of the value of having widespread archives -- to bring in such traffic for those who care about it. The chances of such a "drive by" viewer paying up for a subscription to view that content seems incredibly slim -- and it seems quite likely that the decline in traffic (and ad dollars) would almost certainly outweigh the number of new subscribers added. This doesn't seem to make any sense at all. Does The Economist have any information economists on staff?

Filed Under: archives, journalism, paywall
Companies: economist