British Libraries Must Not Harvest Paywalled News Sites, Govt. Says
The UK government is abandoning plans that would have compelled publishers of content behind “paywalls” to make that content available for free through Britain’s main libraries.
It says the libraries, which had wanted to harvest both free and paid-for content in their archives, had not disproved some publishers’ claims that this would place onerous and expensive technical burdens on them.
I seem to remember
them talking about this ages ago and saying it would be fairly easy to provide all the digital content they create, just not necesarily in the format seen on the website. The data is already there. Deliver in hard drive form.
And it doesn’t matter if it would cost the publishers a lot of money, it would be a legal requirement, just like many other things that cost money.
What, it doesn’t cost money to send copies of your books to the copyright libraries central collection point?