Introduction

If people are familiar with web archives at all, they will most often have heard of the Internet Archive (IA), a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco, California. This is perhaps only to be expected. The IA is ‘amongst the earliest systematic attempts at web archiving, operates at a global scale, and gives unrestricted access to its content via the Wayback Machine’ (Webster, 2017, 176). It has been archiving the web since late 1996, and at the time of writing makes available more than 325 billion historical web pages for browsing and limited searching (Internet Archive, n.d.). Much less well known is that archives and libraries around the world, from Iceland to Australia, are also busy archiving the web. The nature, scale and scope of this archiving activity varies enormously, but unlike the IA these institutions are concerned either solely or primarily with national web domains (usually delimited by a ‘country code Top Level Domain’, or ccTLD, such as .fr or .uk) rather than with the web as a whole. This chapter will outline the different legal frameworks within which this national web archiving takes places, focusing on the impact of electronic legal deposit. It will discuss the vitally important enabling role of e-legal deposit, but also describe the challenges posed by the legislation – to access, use, reuse and publication. It concludes by suggesting why researchers should concern themselves with sometimes complex legal issues, and how they might contribute their voices to ongoing discussions about access to our digital cultural heritage.

Web archives around the world

The situation in the UK is complicated by Crown Copyright (more of which below), but in general national web archives fall into two main categories: those which are created under a legal deposit regime and those which collect on a permissions or fair-use basis. The International Internet Preservation Consortium's (IIPC) list of countries or regions in which some form of domain-based archiving takes place includes 17 countries in the former category and 12 in the latter (International Internet Preservation Consortium, n.d.). Permissions-based and ad hoc archiving is characterised by diversity, but so too is the web archiving that takes place within the framework of legal deposit legislation.