Introduction

Legal deposit has existed in English law since 1662. The system of legal deposit helps to ensure that the nation's published output is collected systematically in order to be able to preserve the material for use by future generations and make it available for readers within the legal deposit libraries (see Figure 4.1).

There has been a rapid growth in the publication of material in non-print forms in recent years and unless these forms of publishing are covered by the legal deposit legislation, the danger would be that we might lose an important part of the UK's national heritage. The legal deposit legislation set out in the Copyright Act 1911 was designed to ensure that the legal deposit libraries received a copy of everything published in the UK. However, by only covering material that was printed in hard copy, the Act ceased to be adequate to ensure the continuation of a comprehensive archive of the nation's published material. For that reason, a number of people lobbied for the scope of the legislation to be extended to electronic content. This ultimately led to the passing of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 (LDLA). The Act is merely enabling legislation and requires the Secretary of State to pass subsidiary legislation to bring its provisions into effect. However, no legislation was passed to implement the provisions of the Act with regard to digital content until the Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013: SI 2013/777.

General principles

‘Legal deposit’ is the legal requirement for publishers to deposit with the British Library and the five other legal deposit libraries (see Figure 4.1) a single copy of each publication. The system is governed by the LDLA.

The Legal Deposit Libraries Bill received Royal Assent on 31 October 2003. The pro - visions for print publications commenced on 1 February 2004, with the coming into force of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act (Commence ment) Order 2004: SI 2004/130. The provisions relating to non-print works came into force on 6 April 2013, with the coming into force of The Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013: SI 2013/777. The 2013 Regulations relate to works published online and works published offline.