The Past Belongs to Brightsolid
On Friday night I had an illuminating Twitter conversation with Will Tattersdill (@faceometer) – a fellow researcher who shares some of my concerns about the new British Library Newspaper Archive. He pointed out an interesting passage in the archive’s terms and conditions:
What you can use the service for:
You can only use the website for your own personal non-commercial use e.g. to research newspaper archives and other archives featured on the website that you are interested in and to purchase goods that we may sell on the website. We are also happy for you to help out other people by telling them about the newspaper archives and other information available on the website and how and where they can be found. However, you must not provide them with copies of any of the newspapers (either an original image of the newspapers or the information on the results page), even if you provide them for free.
It’s easy to brush this off as a classic example of small-print gobbledegook - the kind of thing we all mindlessly agree to every time we’re forced to update iTunes. But, the more I think about it, the more astonishing this passage seems to be. Are they really suggesting that we can’t show copies of their digital newspapers to other people? Even worse, are they suggesting that we can’t even share the information contained within them? It’s one thing to prevent people from making a profit from these materials, but to try and prohibit us from sharing the fruits of our research with friends, colleagues, and students is truly remarkable. Perhaps I’m jumping the gun here, but does this mean I can’t describe the results of a search in an academic article? Am I prohibited from displaying an a newspaper page via powerpoint in an undergraduate lecture? By posting a screenshot of a (barely legible) article in my review, have I broken their terms and conditions?
I’m not sure. But it’s prompted me to ask an important question: who really owns this material? Almost all of the newspapers in the BNA are out of copyright and have been preserved by the British Library at the expense of the taxpayer. They belong to us, and we’re all free to copy and quote from them as much as we like. However, it seems that digitised newspapers are an entirely different story. When an out-of-copyright text is scanned, the resulting ‘digital object’ is subject to new copyright protection. More significantly, this copyright isn’t held by the original writers and publishers, but by the library or digitisation company that performs the scans. In legal terms, it seems that we’re not actually browsing the British Library’s newspaper archive but accessing brightsolid’s collection of digitised texts.
This might seem like a minor distinction, but it has important implications. The BNA is intended to replace Colindale as home of the nation’s historical newspaper collections. However, in order to fund this transition, the British Library has allowed a commercial publisher to assume ownership of the new archive’s contents. It’s up to this commercial company to determine how we access the archive and what we can do with its materials. The past has been privatised. This is brightsolid’s world now – we just live in it.
Edit: a few additional thoughts in the comments.
December 4th, 2011 at 7:57 pm
I’m glad you’re bringing attention to this issue. A publicly-funded library really has no business releasing its content through a private company with an interest in restricting its use.
That having been said, I’m not sure this particular term of service means a whole lot, in practice. Realistically, they can’t prevent casual sharing of their files, and they probably don’t want the kind of publicity that would result from threatening college professors over fair use. If they are sensible people, then they’re probably just trying to prevent anyone from publishing or reselling their archive wholesale. That is, *IF* they’re sensible people.
But more to the point, the value of what they’re selling isn’t so much in the digital images, which they control, but in the public domain text they contain. Not too many people want to read from a poorly-scanned image of a small type 19th-century newspaper, so if you’re interested in distributing the article for its content then you’re more than likely going to be transcribing it–and good luck suing anyone over an e-text of an article from 1865.
The major issue for me is simply the fact that so much essential information about British history is hidden behind a lousy pay wall.
December 4th, 2011 at 9:10 pm
I’m sure that you’re right – there’s no way that they can realistically prohibit people from casual academic sharing. I’m just uncomfortable with the idea that a commercial publisher has acquired copyright control over such an important national archive. In this case I’m sure we can trust them to exercise common sense, but surrendering that kind of power is a dangerously slippery slope.
The original texts are still public domain, but in the not too distant future they’ll be stored away for ‘preservation’ and we’ll be accessing the majority of print culture archives online. I’m completely in favour of this – it widens access and opens up a range of exciting new digital research methodologies. But I’m not happy about these new, surrogate archives slipping out of public control.
There are so many wonderful things that the academic community could do with access to the data stored in the BNA archive. Data mining, e-exhibitions, new search tools like Google ngram. You’ve only got to look at brilliant projects like connected histories to see the potential of open access. Instead, the potential of the archive is determined by commercial impulses – the most profitable thing to do is limit access to the data, spend as little money as possible developing software, aim it at the largest possible audience, and charge as much money as possible to use it.
I can live with subscription fees if they’re the only way to fund the continued development of the archive. But I’m not happy about the privatisation of our past – it’s a lousy solution to the funding problem and serves to limit the potential of what should be a golden age in historical research.
December 4th, 2011 at 10:37 pm
I totally agree, and my sense is that this is probably a temporary thing. Because organizations like Google are doing what they’re doing, people are growing accustomed to free and open archives, and understand their potential. We may just have to wait for the current generation of decision makers to retire.
December 4th, 2011 at 11:05 pm
I hope you’re right – though the BL seem pretty committed to making the BNA a long term project. If/When we do reach more enlightened times, I wonder if we’ll have to re-digitise everything in order to create versions which are free from copyright. There’s always been a tendency towards short-term thinking when it comes to digital technology – I wonder how the BL imagines us accessing the BNA’s contents in 20 years time? Do they have any control over the future of the archive? What happens if it doesn’t turn a profit?
January 9th, 2012 at 10:08 pm
[...] Since then, Bob has added a couple of further posts, exploring some of the points in his review (here and here). For a full description of the BNA and an introduction to the context in which it has [...]