*It's pleasant to have lived long enough to see the emergence of the concept of "web heritage." Eventually one foresees the emergence of a British "web heritage economy" where historically-dressed characters with cathode-ray desktops are cruising through text-files.
*Nice to see that the BBC is so blandly accepting of this idea, too. In the meantime, the US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance is keen to have open-source people expunged from the planet for thoughtcrime. "And now what – you're supposed to give huge chunks of the INTERNET to LIBRARIES and they don't even have to PAY for that? Or even ASK? Are you a RED CHINESE HACKER or something? I don't get it!"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8535384.stm
The UK's online heritage could be lost forever if the government does not grant a "right to archive", a group of leading libraries has said.
The British Library, along with other institutions, has been archiving UK websites since 2004 but has only been able to cover 6,000 of an estimated 8m. (((Care to imagine the horror of actually READING those six thousand websites in a library? Even if you didn't download all the stolen .mp3s, man, you could be at that labor for centuries.)))
Currently, it must ask permission from website owners before archiving them. (((Now imagine the website owner is dead. And his company went broke, too. And, uh, it's fifty years from now and his British seaside home is underwater from climate change. Permission on the Internet, no problem there, right?)))
The group, which has just made its UK Web Archive available to the public, warned of "a digital black hole". (((I think it's time to create some actual MAPS of these "black holes." We got some infoviz maps of the Internet, how 'bout some maps of the dead and missing stuff?)))
"We've got the know-how but we need the rules to say we don't need to ask permission," said a spokesman for the British Library.
"We're archiving for the nation rather than commercial gain." (((Well, yeah, except that, as a library user, I'm supposed to go into a library and use the resources there for anything I want.)))
The British Library believes the UK Web Archive could prove as useful to historians as ancient pamphlets and other ephemeral material in its archive. (((Y'know, over at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, they've actually got a lot of that "ephemeral material." Especially from Britain, 'cause they hauled that stuff out of Britain by the truckload. Man that stuff is weird. It's got the relation to formal history that plankton does to whale oil.)))
'Ridiculous position' (((One can start ridiculing the International Intellectual Property Alliance, but this is like ridiculing the Beverly Hillbillies when they've got enough oil money to buy you, your Senator, your cops, and everybody you know.)))
The consortium, which also includes the National Library of Wales and the Wellcome Library, is lobbying the government to clarify elements of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act. ((("Clarifying elements" —> "copyfight" —> "lawfare")))
The act, which among other things means that every UK print publication is automatically deposited by publishers in the British Library, was extended in 2003 to cover online material. (((And if you think THAT's impressive, try to imagine where the British secret police are putting all that surveillance cam footage. Good thing they've got all those globe-spanning ECHELON data-dumps left over from the Cold War.)))
But the British Library says it never clarified what steps had to be taken before electronic material was recorded.
"We're in the ridiculous position where we have to ask permission of each webmaster before we archive a site," the spokesman said....
