Tag Archives: Digital Preservation

Of Nuts and Sledgehammers: Why MEPs Should Choose their Tools Wisely in Copyright Reform

Graphic for sledgehammers and nutsThe European Parliament’s vote on the draft copyright directive next Wednesday is likely to be the last chance for transparent discussion on the substance of a reform that has been years in the making. It is also a last chance for libraries to reach out to and influence Members of the European Parliament.

A key message will be that European law-makers must choose wisely, and ensure that they are creating rules that are targeted, proportionate, and respect the public interest.

The Draft Copyright Directive

The last wide-ranging piece of EU copyright legislation dates to 2001. Since then, we have seen new technologies and expectations from users, dramatic evolutions in the market for music and media, and an explosion in the amount of copyrighted material produced every day online.

The draft Directive seeks to take stock of these changes, addressing questions around text and data mining, digital education, preservation, use of works which are no longer on sale, rights of press publishers and the obligations of content-sharing platforms, amongst other issues.

The debate has been intense, with a particular focus on Google and YouTube. It has, often, come across as a dramatic struggle between big technology companies and creators.

The problem with this approach is that tends to lead to dramatic solutions – sledgehammers to crack nuts. This blog illustrates just two areas where such dramatic solutions are being proposed, and the harm that they risk doing to libraries and their users.

 

Repositories are not YouTube

Perhaps the most contentious part of the Directive has been Article 13, which deals with the responsibility of content-sharing platforms to remove copyright-infringing materials uploaded by users.

While this covers commercial operations such as YouTube, other sites, such as educational and scientific repositories run by libraries and others also help people share their work. As such, they risk falling under the same rules.

For example, scientific repositories are a vital part of the infrastructure for open access. They host copies of research articles – often pre-print (i.e. not final) versions – allowing people who aren’t registered at the wealthiest universities or research institutions to have access. For doctors, individual researchers, and people in developing countries, this can be essential.

Educational repositories play a major role in spreading Open Educational Resources (OERs). These offer exciting possibilities for teachers to find and use materials which may be better tailored to their needs than traditional textbooks.

The repositories that host these materials are clearly working in the public interest, and are often hosted by libraries, education or research institutions. As concerns their size, resources, and objectives, they have little in common with YouTube.

However, the draft Directive risks treating them in the same way, placing the same regulations and responsibilities upon them. While YouTube can deal with this, it is hard to imagine repositories working on small budgets, and a strong aversion to legal risk, doing the same. See our blog on the risks around Article 13 and filtering for more.

 

Libraries are not Pirates

The desire to fight piracy of copyrighted content extends beyond Article 13. Elsewhere in the directive, organisations representing certain rightholders have made major efforts to impose restrictions on what libraries can do, claiming that this will help limit infringement.

For example, proposals on text and data mining (TDM) could make it very easy to restrict access to materials on the grounds of security, or force researchers to delete the datasets they create as part of the process. Such steps would create a major disincentive to invest time and effort in TDM.

Why do so when access to materials is uncertain, when the work that goes into structuring data will be lost, and when others will not be able to verify the results? Libraries already take care to respect copyright, and do not need further restrictions.

Similarly, there have been major efforts to prevent libraries from taking preservation copies of works held on third-party servers. In a digital world, this is the case for a growing share of what libraries offer their users. Excluding these eBooks, articles and other materials undermines a core mission of libraries, and increases the risk that these works in question being lost in future.

Finally, an amendment proposed to Article 6 of the directive would stop libraries using more than one exception at once. In practical terms, libraries would have to choose between taking a preservation copy of a work, carrying out text and data mining on it, or using it for teaching.

This would be a bizarre situation, with libraries forced to select which of their public interest missions they want to fulfil with works in their collections. It is also unnecessary, as whatever libraries do is still governed by copyright law, and in particular the obligation not to cause unjustified prejudice to rightholders. Libraries should not be forced to choose.

 

There are other areas where misguided rule-making risks doing more harm than good. Indeed, there is a strong argument that it is competition law, not copyright, that provides the best response to the market dominance of just a few major platforms.

While we will have to wait to see if Europe’s competition authorities act in this area. In the meanwhile – and particularly next Wednesday, it will be important to ensure that European law-makers choose their tools wisely.

Sound not Silence: Libraries and International Jazz Day 2018

At IFLA Headquarters, we spend a lot of time focused on what is going on in Geneva. With the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a number of other major UN institutions, and the library which hosted IFLA’s first Headquarters, there is a lot to do there. But today – International Jazz Day – is an opportunity to look further round the lake, to Lausanne, which hosts the world’s biggest jazz library, the Montreux Jazz Archives.

 

Nat King Cole, Gottleib Collection, Library of Congress

Nat King Cole, Gottleib Collection, Library of Congress CC0 (https://bit.ly/2HGsuxp)

The Spontaneous and the Systematic: Archiving and Jazz

 

The centre in Lausanne  hosts an exciting collection of recordings – both sound and video, as well as photos, texts and books from the Montreux festival since its creation in 1963. The collection is accessible in particular through the Montreux Jazz Heritage Lab, which offers a variety of innovative ways of giving access to the materials held.

 

It exists thanks to the vision of its founder – Claude Nobs – who meticulously preserved recordings and documentation for the future. The collection was inscribed into the Memory of the World Register in 2013, as an example of a set of materials which offer a significant insight into human history.

 

Thanks to the centre in Lausanne, the public can now experience these works, while researchers can study them and bring out their uniqueness. By bringing more people into contact with the music – and inspiring new creations – the library, like all others, stimulates both demand for, and supply of, jazz.

Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter, Miles Davis, Duke Jordan, Max Roach - Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress CC0

Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter, Miles Davis, Duke Jordan, Max Roach – Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress CC0 (https://bit.ly/2raQNIW)

Challenges Faced

 

Jazz – and indeed audio-visual works in general – is not normally associated with libraries. But in their mission to capture what it is that shapes our societies for the benefit of the future, jazz is as important a subject of library collections as anything. The nature of so much jazz – built on borrowing, developing and improvising on existing works – is not so far from what other creators do with works they can access through libraries.

 

This is not to say that there are not specific challenges involved.

 

Recording technologies have changed dramatically over the past century, with a serious risk of formats becoming outdated. Moreover, early works are often on highly fragile materials, at imminent threat of disintegration. While many recordings have enjoyed sufficient commercial success to be digitised, remastered and re-issued, this will not be the case for all. It will also not be the case for the programmes, notes and short pieces of film that offer vital context and which may mean so much for aficionados. Preserving the history of jazz requires laws that allow for copying and changing the format of works.

 

Jazz is also cross-border, with the idea born in New Orleans taking root around the world, witness the importance of Switzerland in this piece. Libraries around the world hold jazz collections, often about the same artist. Developing knowledge and giving access to those who cannot afford to visit requires copyright rules that enable cross-border sharing, and in particular allows libraries to provide access to works which are not in commerce.

 

Finally, a jazz recording can contain a number of rights – for scoring and arrangements (where appropriate), for performance, and potentially for producers also. Current discussions in Geneva focus on the idea of a Treaty which risks giving broadcasters rights over materials. Some are calling for these rights to reapply each time a recording is rebroadcast. It is clear that musicians and those who make a real contribution to their work should have the possibility to earn a living from commercial uses of works, but the complexity created by an additional layer of rights will not help.

 

 

Clearly there are many other issues, not least linked to ensuring that there is adequate funding and staffing for libraries and other institutions taking on the challenge of preserving and giving access to jazz for current and future generations. IFLA’s Audiovisual and Multimedia Section leads on IFLA’s work in the area – check out their web pages for more!

Libraries are facing big challenges in digital preservation: We cannot do it alone

This year the first ever International Digital Preservation Day – 30 November 2017, will be celebrated around the world; a celebration of collections preserved, access maintained, and understanding fostered by preserving digital materials.

Digital Preservation Coalition has organised this initiative, aiming both to celebrate existing progress, and to highlight how much there is still to do. IFLA wants to use International Digital Preservation Day to raise awareness of the challenges libraries face in preserving digital heritage, and in ensuring that it remains accessible in the future. This includes issues such as policies, storage, and what Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, refers to as bit-rot – the masses of digital content that become unreadable as technology evolves.

Archives, libraries and other information institutions are well aware of these problems, but they cannot alone find all the solutions. A recent survey conducted under the UNESCO PERSIST initiative offered some ideas on what other action may be needed.

A global overview of digital preservation

Between September and December 2016, The Policy Working Group of the PERSIST project sent out invitations to respond to a survey on national/federal policies and strategies on preservation of digital heritage. IFLA supported this in disseminating the call. 48 respondents from 33 different countries answered, the majority being library or archive staff.

The purpose of the survey was to get a global overview of the existence and implementation of policies and strategies for preserving born-digital materials, and to assess the role that governments assume therein. The survey results have now been aggregated in a final report, and show some of the difficulties in digital heritage preservation – both legal and practical – that libraries are facing, as well as some very interesting cases.

A call for government action
77 % of the respondents reported that in their country there is no written, cross-cutting national or federal strategy. Though there are most often guidelines for archives and records preservation, and that some digital heritage is being preserved within the framework of traditional heritage policy, most strategies are typically organisational rather than national (although this includes institutions with an official national function). This makes it hard for the institutions to approach digital preservation, as the issue is not formalised in many preservation policies.

It proved to be difficult to reach policy makers or staff of governmental organisations in order to obtain their responses to the survey on policies and strategies on digital heritage preservation. A majority of respondents indeed wished that the government would play an active role in this field. 39 % indicated that their governments do not event promote the importance of having strategies for digital heritage preservation at a national level.

Digital preservation is too big of an issue for an individual institution to take upon itself. The Working Group of PERSIST concluded that the four main problems were:

• Lack of leadership
• Lack of knowledge
• Lack of funds
• Lack of consensus between domains/institutions

The report shows the need to advocate for preservation efforts and increased public awareness, as well as the need for common standards and ways to approach this issue.

The world seems to be losing its ability to record and preserve modern-day history. Libraries are simply asking for regulations that could fix this. Enhancing the sustainability of preservation of digital heritage is a shared responsibility of public and private parties. IFLA supports the dialogue among these parties in order to enhance the preservation of digital heritage.

For more, read the full report here: https://unescopersist.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/reportsurveypersistpoliciesstrategies-1-5.pdf.