Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I wish to move an amendment to the Order of Business, that No. 12 be taken before No. 1. No. 12 is our Bill to amend the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 to ensure that the online content and digital output of our country is preserved in order that citizens and researchers within the country and abroad are guaranteed permanent access to the online intellectual and cultural memory of our country.

The National Library of Ireland has the legal responsibility to collect every physical publication in the State. It does not, however, have a legal right to archive digital online material from the Internet. I have published this web archive Bill to amend the Copyright and Related Rights Act to give it that right because online websites disappear at an alarming rate and that creates a black hole in our country’s memory. We need to give the National Library of Ireland the right to legally collect and preserve this memory before it is lost.

Some 60% of national libraries across Europe have in place adequate copyright law that allows them to collect appropriately the content of their state domain’s websites. In our case that is the .ie domain. When the former director of the National Library of Ireland, Dr. Sandra Collins, appeared before the Oireachtas joint committee in June 2021, she said:

In 2019, we did a full domain .ie crawl. Approximately 230,000 Irish websites end with .ie. With our technology partner, we captured a snapshot in time of every one of those websites. It is a resource that researchers and historians in the future will take as a record of what the country was saying during 2019. The act of collecting those websites put us [the National Library of Ireland] in breach of copyright legislation. We have that resource securely locked away, but we cannot provide access to it for researchers, historians and people in Ireland who are interested in it.

This legislation would, I hope, right that wrong. The Government and its agencies are also probably one of the biggest publishers in the State. Most Government publications are hosted on websites that have no long-term access guarantee and there is no centralised access to the Government records or repository either. That is something that needs to be addressed. I would welcome the House’s support on First Stage of the Bill.