Labour Mole to Demand Nightly Print-Outs of the Entire Internet?

14 September 2003, 15:43 GMT

Our trainee news troll talks to the Mole...

In a recent news story on The Register, it was announced that thanks to New Labour dynamo Chris Mole, website owners could be required to submit electronic copies of their sites to the British Library, for archiving purposes - at the website owners' expense.

"You couldn't make something like that up," an angry website owner retorted yesterday. "While they're at it," he added sarcastically, "perhaps they could put a copy of the Internet on my laptop?"

"Aside from the technology issues, they're completely missing the point," he added, "that book publishers - who have been required to submit copies of their books to the British Library for centuries - are businesses. But most websites are run by individuals, who quite frankly could spend the money on more important things, like mobile phone ring tones."

Already NL has begun to realise that this plan could be rather impractical to say the least. For example, the site owner must also make available:

"a copy of any computer program and any information necessary in order to access the work, and a copy of any manual and other material that accompanies the work and is made available to the public."

In response to this bizarre requirement, a website owner commented: "Perhaps we should be forced to train them too, at our own expense, offer out of hours support, win2k licenses, database licenses, pay for the electricity bills, back rubs etc?"

To add to the shock news though, a further ruling - which we can report exclusively here on the Rumour Mill - states that, to get around the technology issue, all news sites will instead be forced to print out their entire archive of news stories, every night, and have them couriered over to the British Library.

When questioned about this, NL spokeswoman Mary Knot scoffed: "Absolute piffle! People think the NL is stuck in the stone age and has no grasp of modern technology. But what these people don't realise is that we're also allowing these 'Internet double-you double-you double-you sites' to send their web pages using modern advances such as facsimile. I mean get with the plan, gramps!" she added, rolling her eyes.

This ruling could adversely affect news agencies such as Reuters, which (the Register reports) "produces the equivalent of 10,000 CDs of information every day."

"How the blazes will we be able to print all that out every day?" a passerby thundered on behalf of Reuters.

It has also come to light that "news sites" will cover a broad spectrum of websites, including web-based newsgroup front-ends such as Google Groups (formerly Deja News).

"Some ISPs also provide web-based newsgroup front-ends," fumed regular Usenet contributor Javed Burns. "The British Library is going to get inundated with all this duplicate information - terabytes of burbling messages and meaningless rants from people just like me."

"With this project," Knot enthused, "we are aiming to fully document the angry voice of the uneducated masses - the common people."

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