Order Order
Gone, surely, are the days when the British Parliament was considered secretive and closed. Sound recordings of the House started thirty years ago - John Sargeant recently presented a programme all about this on Radio 4.
Odd then that so much of the online archive is only available either for a fee or if you are on the books of a British university.
If you're outraged by this, you're not alone. Erik Ringmar is a professor in Taiwan who thinks everyone should have free online access to the parliamentary record. Its got people talking.
You can hear Eddie's interview with Erik Ringmar here:
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The firm Proquest were given permission to digitise the parliamentary record. Eddie has been speaking its Publishing Director - Dan Burnstone:
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Thanks to Eddie and the team for highlighting the question of public and unrestricted access to old parliamentary materials. The original article I wrote on the topic is available here: http://ringmar.net/toomanymangoes/?p=195.
all the best,
Erik
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I was pretty astonished several weeks ago to see that Hansard goes up to a few years before '82 - before I was born ... I fell asleep on last year's Falklands Night on BBC Parliament ... found this link with my (ahem) advanced Googling skills...
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1982/apr/03/prayers#S6CV0021P0-02553
It shows all of the day's debate I presume but linked up to Thatcher's speech.
No password needed so ... Happy reading!
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Whilst I fully agree that Parliamentary papers and similar documents should be freely available. Erik Ringmar's approach to the issue undermines the protection which copyright legislation offers to all creators of intellectual property.
The kind of action that he suggests would probably do no more than make a minor dent in the profits of large companies such as ProQuest, but for the great majority of artists, musicians, photographers, writers and suchlike who struggle to make a living from their work and need every penny of the royalties that they earn, it would be a much more serious matter.
The law makes no allowance for the financial resources of copyright holders, so the protection that it gives to the rich is the price that has to be paid for the protection that the rest of us need to safeguard our livelihoods.
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I just wanted to say that contrary to the impression given by your story, ProQuest does not in fact publish Hansard, much less charge for access to it. Our Parliamentary Papers are the so-called Sessional Papers (which include Bills, House Papers and Command Papers). We understand that Hansard will be available in full withour charge from the House of Commons in the near future.
Thanks for the opportunity to put this right.
Dan Burnstone
ProQuest
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I got all this way to point out our project at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/ - and Jeff beat me to it!
We're backed by Parliament as an experiment. You might even call it a beta. The software we run on is open source - and we've released the source code of the application.
Comments most welcome.
PS. nice podcast.
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