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The organisation used the opening of the Labour Party Conference to launch an Intellectual Property (IP) Manifesto, highlighting the threat posed to the current copyright rules enjoyed by libraries. The British Library is tackling the undefined nature of IP rights in the digital age, as embodied in UK law, with DRM implementations being increasingly unforgiving for libraries and public bodies.

'The current stand-off on IP threatens innovation, research and our digital heritage,' declared its CEO, Lynne Brindley.

She highlighted that currently the law does not permit copying of sound or film items for preservation. Without the right for libraries and archives to make copies, she maintained, the UK risks losing a large part of its recorded culture.

'Our IP Manifesto sets out the unique role that the UK national library must play as both a leading voice and an honest broker in the debate that the digital revolution has generated,' she said Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library. 'As a publisher in its own right, the Library understands the opportunities and threats presented by digital to the publishing industries. As one of the world's great research libraries we are equally mindful of the threat that an overly restrictive, or insufficiently clear, IP framework would pose to future creativity and innovation.'

The IP Manifesto's recommendations include: existing limitations and exceptions to copyright law should be extended to encompass unambiguously the digital environment; licences providing access to digital material should

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not undermine longstanding limitations and exceptions, such as 'fair dealing'; and the right to copy material for preservation purposes - a core duty of all national libraries, the library maintains - should be extended to all copyrightable works.

Also, it recommends that the copyright term for sound recordings should not be extended 'without empirical evidence of the benefits and due consideration of the needs of society as a whole', and that the length of copyright term for reproducing unpublished works should be brought into line with other terms for published works (i.e. life of author plus 70 years).

You can read the British Library's IP Manifesto in full here (PDF).

At the heart of the issues is the fact that contract law supersedes copyright law. In other words, the traditional checks and balances that have evolved in copyright law (balancing rewards for innovation with general social good) are signed away in the licence agreements that are part of the automated DRM systems than control access to digital data.

Back in June, at the launch of the All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG) report into Digital Rights Management, the chief executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, warned that DRM is already having an impact on the traditional exceptions to copyright law that have existed for libraries.

She said that copyright and intellectual property (IP) laws need to balance the rights of content creators with the need to maintain access in the public good.

'We at the British Library use DRMs to manage our collections and we recognise they can be a valuable tool,' Brindley said at the time. 'However, while protecting rights holders against infringement they can prevent copying of material for fair dealing purposes. Digital material generally comes with a contract, and these contracts are nearly always more restrictive than existing copyright law and frequently prevent copying, archiving and access by the visually impaired.'