Tom Morris

British Library and Wikisource: copyrights and permissions

I’m writing this post to explain as best as I can the current situation regarding the legal situation over unambigulously out-of-copyright texts in the British Library and the possibility of making public domain reproductions of them for release, say, on sites like Project Gutenberg or Wikisource.

I came to looking into this because of the difficulty of finding sources for the history of Ethical culture, a forerunner of modern day humanist or freethought movements. I had a look on the British Library Integrated Catalogue and found a lot of sources: I put the list up on the Ethical culture talk page. But as a lot of these are out of copyright, it makes sense to put them up on Wikisource.

But here’s the rub: the British Library forbid you from making scans of BL materials. That’s fine. There are problems: basically, for fragile materials, it is right that they insist on their people doing the copying. But there are problems with this: firstly, the cost is quite high. Making copies of BL materials requires payment of a fee that can be quite substantial. And the BL then derive a new copyright from the modified work and require you to pay a license to them to reuse it. Fine if you are a Hollywood producer or someone like that. But if you are trying to collect material that is out-of-copyright to include in an archive like Wikisource or Project Gutenberg, that’s not very useful.

I raised the question on the Wikisource Scriptorium about this: could we potentially make a non-image based copy. That is, someone could request an out-of-copyright item from the British Library, then go into the BL with a laptop and make a verbatim copy of the text and post it on Wikisource. Wikisource have one minor problem with this: they require that another Wikisource user does a proofread of the source. With a digital file of the original text, that’s easy: someone else looks at the DjVu file and compares it with the text copy. But where the original is on a piece of paper in a reading room, that’s not so easy.

But that’s not an issue I’m really that bothered about: that is a solveable issue. You can have two people with reader passes both go to the BL and check a source over before publication.

The copyright issue remains as does another issue: the conditions of use, specifically §25 of the conditions of use.

Copies of Library collections must only be made using Library copying facilities.

I phoned the British Library today to try and resolve this issue. I asked them whether making a verbatim text copy of an out-of-copyright work onto a laptop or into a notebook would result in them claiming a new copyright existed for the copy: they answered that no, this would not be an issue.

Secondly, I asked whether or not doing so would infringe §25 of the Conditions of Use or any other restriction placed on registered Readers. They also said that this would not be an issue. They said that by ‘Copies of Library collections’ they meant photographic/reprographic type copies rather than verbatim text transcriptions.

They did note that when people make such a copy, it would be very useful if they could give attribution to the British Library just in terms of the provenance of the work. For Wikisource, this is not an issue. On the talk page for texts posted on Wikisource, one is asked to provide details of the provenance of the work. I’m in the middle of transferring Evelyn Underhill’s famous book on Mysticism to Wikisource, and it is a public domain work from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library - you can see the attribution here. I assured the guy that experienced Wikimedians are about the most anal people you can find on matters of copyright, licensing and attribution. And, really, if you drew a Venn diagram of Wikimedians, British Library Readers and people willing to spend hours typing up obscure out-of-copyright works, the intersection of the three are probably going to be so nerdy and obsessive that providing comprehensive attribution will not be an issue.

I am not a lawyer, but it doesn’t seem possible for them to assert a copyright interest in a work that has been copied from a public domain text that they give you access to as a reader. I felt it was important to get clarification of the intent of §25.

It would be useful to get clarification of this from a lawyer: does this clarification suffice? Could I – or other Wikimedians, or the Wikimedia Foundation – be liable to a legal challenge from the British Library on the grounds of breaching the terms of use of the library by making verbatim text copies of these materials and publishing them?

Given that I have now made a good-faith effort to work out what the legal situation is, unless I am advised otherwise by either the British Library or by someone with expertise in this area, I plan to go ahead in the near future and start making and releasing public domain text copies of public domain works in the British Library. I encourage others to do likewise unless we hear of good reasons not to.

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

British Library and Amazon to make available on DRM platform works paid for by the British taxpayer

Have a read of this announcement by the British Library: An historic new deal by the British Library and Amazon will make 65,000 largely out-of-print 19th century titles available for purchase via ‘print-on-demand’ service CreateSpace, which will be free to download from the Amazon Kindle.

Got that? 65,000 books that are out-of-print and out-of-copyright have been snapped up by Amazon and will be made available for purchase through print-on-demand or for free if you own an Amazon Kindle, a DRM-riddled ebook reader whose availability outside the United States has been an embarassing afterthought (you can’t buy the Kindle from Amazon.co.uk, only off Amazon.com and they don’t even have the decency to send you a UK power adapter - this led to The Guardian describing the move as: Amazon isn’t so much attacking the UK ebook market as permitting its Kindle to be used here).

I’m sure some of us who don’t own a Kindle - which is to say the bulk of UK e-book device owners who instead have opted for DRM-free/DRM-optional readers like those built by Sony and Elonex - would rather like to read some of these books. I mean, the taxpayer rightly funds the British Library (through, the BL website informs me). Readers also fund the Library - both directly (through sponsorship, becoming a Friend of the Library) and indirectly (buying food and drink in the cafe and books and merchandise in the shop). We’ve paid for the works to be preserved, and now that funding is being turned against us. Amazon’s Kindle - need I remind you - not only has this DRM strategy, but a strategy that actually lets Amazon remotely remove books from your device, which they have used to claw back accidentally released copies of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. This led, of course, to obvious but amusing remarks about how your bookshelf can be remotely ransacked and suppressive books (i.e. those which don’t fit in with the current copyright regime) can be stuffed into the memory hole.

I don’t know why this is necessary. Why do we need the Amazon middle man to make digital copies of out-of-copyright works available?

Just imagine what the British Library could do if - a purely hypothetical scenario, you’ll agree - it were possible to scan books cheaply, run them through free, open-source optical character recognition and digitisation software and then make the resulting files available on some kind of universal, international digital network so readers could obtain them for no cost. If only the technology were available for that, eh? So much better to get people to pay for digitised, DRMed versions of their own cultural heritage.

I have rather a distaste for the word ‘fail’, but it is perfectly appropriate here: the British Library, by selling out our cultural heritage to Amazon’s DRM strategy, is failing in their commitment to make knowledge available to all, of “safeguarding history”, of “preserving, and ensuring access in perpetuity to, the UK’s national published archive”. It is ransacking history to puff up Amazon’s business model, shortchanging the public in the process and giving support to a technology that stands in ideological opposition to the very principle of open access to information that a library is supposed to uphold. And for what? A pat on the head from Mandleson? Some writeups in the press about how the library is “digitally engaged” (engaged to what? Being engaged is no achievement if you are engaged to a wife-batterer)? It’d be bad if this were just a marketing gimmick - a way to show that the library is digitally ‘with it’ - but it is so much worse: it undermines the very values libraries are supposed to uphold.