LIBRARIANS IN PORCINE COPYRIGHT CONUNDRUM

PC Pro reports on the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance’s comments to the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG, as it is unfortunately known for short) inquiry into DRM. The librarians have expressed concern that overly strict digital rights management will prevent librarians from fulfilling their function of preserving information by blocking them from being able to transfer data on to new media as they are developed. LACA wrote in its submission

As custodians of human memory, a number [of libraries] would keep digital works in perpetuity and may need to be able to transfer them to other formats in order to preserve them and make the content fully accessible and usable once out of copyright.

The IPKat supports measures that would further the work of libraries, but he notes that this is not a general argument against DRM.