The German National Library is threatening bloggers and website owners with a €10,000 (£8,500) fine if they don’t submit material to its digital archive project – a move met with anger and derision by the country’s online community. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) was mandated by a law introduced in 2006 to fine non-participants in the digitisation scheme as a last resort, as part of plans to bring what it considers content of public interest together in one place.

Ute Schwens, director of the DNB in Frankfurt, said (via FT.com) the library was consulting with national libraries in France, Holland, the UK and north America and, though it is archiving e-books and dissertations, it will be “moving into the areas of blogs and websites fairly soon”: “We’re interested in blogs by people in public life - but not in every site of every private individual.” The DNB is already in discussions with newspapers and magazine publishers but Schwens makes clear that the content has to be of public interest and not “purely commercial”. 

In the UK, the issue has been not “how much are content producers going to be fined?” but “how are they going to be paid?”. In January, the National Library of Wales upset some writers by offering no royalties for their inclusion in a £1 million, lottery-funded project to digitise 600,000 Welsh language articles.

Robert adds: I once gave the National Library permission to include some of my work in its archive, which remains the only digital store for some articles that have otherwise gone offline.

• Welsh Writers Demand Digital Rights Payments