Copyright Strikes Again: No Online Access To UK Internet Archive
Last week we wrote about how Norway had come up with a way to provide online access to all books in Norwegian, including the most recent ones, available to anyone in the country. Here, by contrast, is how not to do it, courtesy of publishers in the UK:
Context & Ripple Effects
Techdirt's piece lands at a fork in how nations open their book heritage online: Norway has arranged nationwide digital access to all books in Norwegian, recent titles included, while UK publishers have blocked the UK Internet Archive from offering online access to its collections on copyright grounds. The framing is deliberate — one confirmed arrangement held up as the working model, the other as the cautionary tale.
The story travelled beyond Techdirt's usual readership, with pickups by Gigaom and library-world commentary, which matters because the Norway-versus-UK comparison gives librarians and archivists a concrete bargaining argument rather than an abstract grievance about copyright enforcement.
First-order effects
- UK readers and researchers immediately lose legal online access to the Internet Archive's digitized UK book collections that publishers have blocked, pushing any legitimate reading back toward physical copies or paid channels.
- Norwegian readers keep nationwide access to the country's full book output under the negotiated model the article contrasts against the UK's enforcement approach.
Second-order effects
- UK publishers now have to defend licensing-based access schemes against a visible national-archive alternative that library commentators can cite directly, raising the reputational cost of pure enforcement.
- Other countries planning mass digitization face a forced choice of models: negotiate collective access with rights holders as Norway did, or accept that publisher copyright claims keep the archive offline as in the UK.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, national digital-library infrastructure concentrates in jurisdictions where rights holders agree to collective access, while enforcement-first markets leave their digitized cultural record locked away — a structural divergence in who gets to build the archive layer.
- The episode strengthens the case for legislative exceptions for library and archive digitization, since voluntary licensing demonstrably fails to deliver nationwide access in some markets.
The trend: National book-digitization is splitting along copyright lines, between collectively licensed national access models and archives blocked by rights-holder enforcement.