Mock Turtle writes “For almost a century, publishers have been legally required to deposit books with the British Library. But a draft law will be debated in the House of Lords tomorrow that, perhaps bizarrely, seeks to extend this obligation to web site operators.
Chris Mole, Labour MP for Ipswich, has laudable intentions for the Legal Deposit Libraries Bill, calling it his “bid to capture electronic publications for future generations.”
Such a motive inspired the Internet Archive, a non-profit US project that has archived snapshots of web pages since 1996 and makes them publicly available via its popular Wayback Machine. But the Internet Archive, with benefactors including AT&T, Xerox and the Library of Congress, does all the hard work: like search engine bots, it visits your site and records what it finds.
The new proposal switches responsibility to the publisher to deliver a copy of his site, at his own expense.
Read the rest at Out-Law.com
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