back to article German national library rocks blogosphere

The German blogosphere has got itself into a bit of a tizz over the Nationalbibliothek's alleged plan to catalogue the entire local internet - in the process obliging every website owner and blogger to submit material or face a €10,000 fine. According to the Financial Times, the shock strategy to bend the web to the national …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    great idea

    All the smut, filth and porn in one loction. Sorted.

  2. Theresa Jayne Forster
    Coat

    Its not just Germany

    Well what about the British Library, I applied a while ago for a job with the British Library where they are planning to log everything that has ever been published on a .co.uk domain, I assume by screen scraping often.

  3. Frank
    Thumb Down

    Internet? Website? Duh!

    "..The library had indeed in 2006 been mandated by the government to "collect web publications" and fine the uncooperative..."

    Hey German Library people, if somebody 'publishes' something on a website, you can see it using a browser. If you can see it using a browser then you can take a copy. You can automate this process with widely available website stripper/copiers. You can even develop your own web stripper/copier if you want to boost your development budget.

    It's this thing called the internet and the world wide web. You can even look at things outside Germany if you want to and you might get interested in collecting copies. If you do, don't try threatening foreign web-publishers with fines, they'll just laugh at you.

  4. Frumious Bandersnatch
    Joke

    you can't hast everything

    where would you put it?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Great name

    "Robert Basic"

    That is all.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Won't go back even for cash.

    What happened to copyright?

  7. Someone

    Re: Internet? Website? Duh!

    Frank, you’re making the Phormesque mistake of assuming web and public are equivalent. What about all the private, password-protected stuff? Denmark’s solution is different. Rather than require submissions, the libraries have access to the passwords!

    http://politiken.dk/newsinenglish/article584315.ece

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    odd

    Curiously reminiscent of http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40076

  9. Cris E

    Or, hey, help them to death

    Just have everyone bundle up their entire site each day and send it all in. At once. Every day. Maybe include a few other choice morsels for posterity, like say all their vacation pictures and maybe an old SUSE distro and some Win2K updates and 200MB of random text. At any rate, be careful what you ask for: "All" can be Pretty Big (and really useless.)

  10. Frank
    Thumb Down

    @Someone re. Re. Internet?.....

    I certainly don't confuse 'web' and 'public' since I do have my own non-public information tucked away in a sub-domain of my own website.

    It is very reasonable for a national library to take and store copies of any published document (I see it as part of their job). However, the key point here is the word 'publication'. (Notice the structure - PUBLICation). I don't consider web based storage of private and limited access data as 'publication'

    I followed the link you gave and was horrified by what seems to be happening in Denmark. If this is the route that Germany is taking (apparently not but maybe 'not yet') then I'm sure that the UK will not be far behind, if they aren't already secretly in front.

    If this is followed through then who will feel comfortable storing information on an internet connected web-server?

  11. Chris C

    re: Won't go back...

    "What happened to copyright?"

    Let's ask Google. After all, most people were happy when Google announced they would be scanning every book they could get their grubby fingers on, thereby infringing the authors' copyright by scanning, storing, and indexing the books in their entirety. Somehow, even though Google was scanning the books in their entirety, thereby making a complete digital COPY of the books, some people think COPYRIGHT law doesn't apply. Go figure.

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