Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Earl of Clancarty and Baroness Jones of Whitchurch

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. He talked about the principle of transparency, and that is the nub of it. I shall just give an example: the history of pop music has, in many ways, been the history of exploitation of artists in a bad way. Much of that exploitation was based, in the past, on keeping artists in the dark. I am sure that today many licensees and transferees—some of which are huge companies—behave very well, but there is a systemic imbalance here, which means that there is potential for abuse. Artists have a fundamental right to information about exploitation of their work, which is, in any case, useful for knowing quite simply what has happened to their work when it is pushed out into the world.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for raising this again today. As both previous speakers have said, it is a really important issue for authors, writers and musicians, who are operating in an increasingly complex world where it is very hard to keep tabs on the use that is being put to their own creative work and the way it is being distributed and accessed. As a result, many in the sector feel that they are not properly rewarded for their creative endeavour. It is obviously crucial to us that we encourage them to continue to be creative and help them to be fairly rewarded because, as we increasingly begin to recognise, that creativity is not only important to them but will be an essential bedrock of the UK’s future prosperity in the years to come.

The noble Lord quite rightly raised the issue of the draft directive on copyright, and he quoted the Minister’s reliance on the discussions of that draft in her response in Committee. However, as with other pieces of draft EU legislation, there is now a horrible feeling that the clock is ticking and that time might run out before the directive can be transposed into UK law. Therefore, we very much support the noble Lord in his bid to bring more certainty to the lives, and the incomes, of our much-valued creators.

I would like to raise two further points. First, the amendments as they stand assume that all publishers have the facility to provide regular statements of income outside the normal accounting periods. This is indeed easy for the large publishers, which already have author portals where this kind of detailed information is uploaded in real time and accessible to authors and their agents on a daily basis. However, we should also spare a thought for the smaller publishing houses, whose growth we also want to encourage, and which might not have such sophisticated accounting systems. The wording of the amendments might be rather too prescriptive or open to interpretation in this regard. We do not want to add too much of an extra burden to those smaller organisations.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the amendments do very little to help those authors who are beholden to Amazon, which publishes 90% of e-books and is responsible for a significant proportion of physical book sales. Its behaviour in driving down prices through heavy discounting is seriously damaging the incomes of authors and publishers alike. Therefore, you can have transparency and fairness, but we will not add much more value back into the creative sector unless steps are taken to curb the monopolistic behaviour of Amazon. Perhaps the Minister could advise us as to what steps are being taken to monitor that increasing dominance of Amazon and to look at the impact it is having on the income of people who are trying to be creative and whom we very much want to value. At what stage would the Government take steps to intervene to make sure that those incomes are, in some way, protected for the future?