The idea here is to seek copyright holders to voluntarily release
content with a free license, just like how we regularly try this through OTRS etc. No one here suggests ignoring copyright, at least not me. I however believe our regular method of seeking this may be inadequate this time as we will be dealing with possibly for profit commercial entities that may need a bit more effort to convince.
- In the interest of public interest given the very nature of the report, there is in my view a strong argument that copyright restrictions restrict/limit access to the supplementary files to the report.
- We seek free licenses to these files to safeguard their existence on the internet since it is not clear for how long the "Iraq Inquiry" website will stay where it is, will it be there in five years? Five decades? The public interest could only be secured if we are able to make copies of the supplementary documents without copyright restrictions.
- Our work with the files (wikification) will make the documents more searchable and digestible, easing public access to the report and its supplementary media.
These can be the rationale or part of the rationale we can use to persuade BBC etc. to willingly release such rights for a select number of files. We can debate the rationale further. I feel success of this is more likely if the problem is highlighted (possibly by using our devised criteria) by an MP or several MPs prior to our attempts which could create some informal high level discussion that would ease this process. I do not expect a bill to be introduced or something like that.
We ought to also identify who owns the copyright of all the media on the site in question, perhaps a list of files page where we can identify the filename and copyright in order to manage this. The archive is massive and that is why this is needed.