THE IMPORTANCE OF LEGAL REQUIREMENTS FOR WEB ARCHIVES STUDIES IN BELGIAN AND FRENCH LAWS

The studies and research achieved through different web archives bring a lot of legal questions and involve the respect of many obligations for researchers. Several European directives or regulations, and de facto their implementation in national law, have to be taken into account for web archives studies to remain lawful. As the researchers’ will for the archives to be as open as possible tends to collide with the legal framework, which often rather focuses on restricting access, it is important to be aware of these legal requirements beforehand. This chapter will focus on the two main legal areas applicable to web archives studies at the European level. Those subjects therefore have a transnational impact on multiple European web archives and have implications for the reuse of the web archives by researchers. We will present the European framework and focus on a comparison of its implementation in Belgian and French laws, to show how it can actually translate at the national level and what it practically implies for researchers and archiving institutions of these two states.