Looking for something else entirely today, I stumbled across this 2007 blog post by Georgia Harper on “a post-copyright era” for digital preservation. It’s provocative:

“I’ve begun more and more to believe that for some things libraries need to do for the future, they just need to be done without much concern for what the law says today. The very idea that anyone who’s job it is, or I should say who’s mission in life it is, to preserve for posterity, simply cannot stand by and watch important pieces of the 20th century just crumble before their eyes because of fear of getting sued…”

And then it’s even more provocative:

“This is like the moral dilemma of our time… like civil disobedience. Defiant preservation, organization, indexing, and access.”

I like it.

Especially her description of a Library of Congress meeting on digital archiving, with the Registrar of Copyrights in attendence, at the start of which “the participants agreed that they would define the copyright issues out of the discussion.” She goes on to say “I was absolutely amazed at the quantity of ideas entertained, the quality of the solutions proffered, the creativity of the group. If copyright had been on the table, …it would have been, in effect, a nonstarter.”

She has a point. A strong one. A kind of Nike slogan for digital preservation projects: Just do it.