Legal Aspects of Digital Preservation

Digital preservation has become culturally, as well as economically, indispensable. The preserving of business processes is an emerging challenge for each company, regardless of industry sector and size. This book focuses on the legal aspects of digital preservation and offers legal guidance in that area.

This important book illustrates the implications of preservation actions on intellectual property rights and data protection. These can include: potential violation of data protection laws through the storage of personal data, and potential infringement of a copyright-holder's exclusive right to reproduce and store their copyright protected data. The book considers the scope of protection under both IP rights and data protection, and offers strategies on avoiding potential infringement. Further IT contracting issues and selected existing legal obligations to preserve data are described with a particular emphasis on digital preservation.

The clear exposition of the legal framework, and the detailed analysis of Legal Aspects of Digital Preservation will be of great utility to practitioner advising companies who are digitally preserving business processes, as well as those companies themselves, developers of preservation systems, and researchers in the field of digital archiving.

Contents: Foreword 1. Introduction 2. Legal Aspects of Digital Preservation 3. Copyrights 4. Data Protection 5. Legal Obligations to Preserve Data 6. IT Contracting Bibliography Index