Digital Preservation and Copyright
| Author | June M. Besek |
| Position | Executive Director, Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, Columbia University Law School |
Can you imagine a world without Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey? Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? Twain's Huckleberry Finn? Van Gogh's Irises? Books and letters, photographs and drawings, music and movies are windows on history and culture. They inform and entertain us, aid in understanding the past and serve as a basis for future scholarship and creativity. Such works of authorship have remained available over centuries thanks to the preservation efforts of libraries, archives and museums. But now, many books, letters, photographs and other works are born digital, and the Internet has fostered new forms of authorship like blogs and personal web pages. Unfortunately, many digital works disappear every day. They are removed, replaced or superseded and are thus forever lost to future generations.
Systematic efforts to preserve digital materials are lacking in part because of copyright laws. Digital preservation inevitably entails copying. Many countries have exceptions from copyright to enable preservation activities of libraries, archives and other preservation institutions, but those exceptions have not kept pace with digital technology.
Before the digital era, preservationists acted on perceptible evidence of deterioration such as a fold test to detect brittle pages or the smell of vinegar signaling acidifying film. Digital material is often deleted or replaced before a preservationist can even get to it.
How does digital preservation create copyright issues? In the past, preservation of analog works was generally a passive activity, requiring only occasional interventions to repair or restore hard copies of books, films, sketches, drawings, photographs, etc. Such actions were triggered by perceptible evidence of deterioration: a fold test can detect brittle pages, the smell of vinegar signals acidifying film. Digital works, however, are often short-lived because they can be deleted, written over or corrupted rapidly and without advance warning. Preservation efforts must begin soon after they are created or acquired. The problem arises in that any contact with a digital work - cataloging, maintenance, migrating the works to new formats - involves making copies. In addition, digital preservation practices require creation of multiple redundant copies for retention in different locations to protect against losses due to fire, flood or...
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