Intellectual Property Bill [HL]

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, Clause 13 makes it a criminal offence intentionally to copy a UK or EU-registered design in the course of business without the consent of its owner. It will also be an offence to try to profit from the use of the copy in the course of business. This clause has attracted much debate, both here and in the other place. My right honourable friend David Willetts and I have also had extensive discussions with industry representatives, and I have listened carefully to the views of both large and small design businesses.

A number of industry representatives voiced serious concerns that the drafting of the clause left some uncertainty as to the scope of the sanction. They believed that the clause could be interpreted more widely than the Government intended—a view supported by members of the judiciary. As a result, the Government made two sets of amendments to this clause in the other place to clarify the scope of the sanction, and therefore strengthen its effectiveness. The Government recognise the importance of creating certainty for those businesses that may be affected by the criminal sanction.

Amendments 4, 6, 8, 11 and 12 insert the word “intentionally” into the clause to make it absolutely clear that unconscious and accidental copying should not be caught by the offence. These amendments are not intended to make the offence harder to prove, but simply to clarify that the offence should apply only to intentional copying. It has always been the Government’s aim to create an offence that deters specific, purposeful copying, as can be seen from previous debates in this House. I do not believe that inserting the word “intentionally” into the statute changes this underlying aim.

I now turn to Commons Amendments 5, 7, 9 and 10. These amendments concern the scope of the offence, in the context of assessing whether one design has been copied from another. The amendments replace the word “substantially” in the clause with the phrase,

“with features that differ only in immaterial details”.

I will take just a moment to remind noble Lords that the intention of this criminal sanction has always been to cover exact copies, and copies where the design has been very slightly altered. In achieving this policy aim, the Government have been mindful not to capture the type of differences that can quite legitimately result in the creation of a new design. The amendments help achieve this, so that when making an assessment of whether a design has been copied, immaterial details may be disregarded. It is right that what amounts to “immaterial details” should be determined by the courts in the light of the details of the case in front of them.

The decision to replace the word “substantially” arose from detailed discussions with industry representatives. They expressed concern that the term was not clearly defined in registered design law and could therefore create uncertainty, which in turn could affect legitimate follow-on design. The revised form of wording—“immaterial details”—is more familiar to industry and reflects existing language in the Registered Designs Act 1949, in the context of deciding whether a design is new. By definition, a new design cannot be a copy. The wording provides users not only with a familiar term but gives the courts a more precise test than “substantially”.

These amendments will help remove uncertainty in the criminal sanction that could impact negatively on innovation, but the new wording also reinforces the important point that someone who intentionally copies another person’s registered design will not be excused simply because they have made some immaterial changes to that design.

To conclude, both sets of amendments made by the Government to Clause 13 will help clarify the scope of the offence and give industry the certainty it needs to allow follow-on innovation to continue without fear of crossing the line. I beg to move.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction to this group of amendments and, indeed, for his oral and written briefings while the Bill was going through the Commons. It was most helpful to have a blow-by-blow account of the amendments as they were put forward by the Government.

I do not want to appear churlish, and I will not be pressing the matter to a vote, but the amendments cause some considerable concern. The inclusion of the phrase,

“features that differ only in immaterial details from that design”,

as inserted by Amendments 5, 7 and others, give me particular cause for concern. I and organisations such as ACID, which represents smaller designers, are concerned that this change drastically narrows the offence to such an extent that it will apply only to the production of counterfeits. Given wider consultation, a much better form of words would have been achieved—something on the lines of “to make a product exactly to that design or to a design which does not produce on the informed user a different overall impression”. In the circumstances, that would have been far preferable.

The provision will put in place a deterrent to protect registered designs against absolutely slavish copying, but the new wording, as it stands, will allow someone to make sufficient small changes which are not “material” changes to avoid the offence. The intent to copy is still there whether they are immaterial or material changes, and I have grave doubts about whether the newly amended provision will be effective in protecting designers, particularly small designers.

At this point, I want to quote from the noble Viscount’s letter of 5 March, which was very heavily directed towards explaining why these amendments had been adopted in the way that he has described. However, it goes into rather greater detail. In his last paragraph dealing with Clause 13, he says:

“Some have inferred that because the term ‘substantial’ is used in copyright legislation, and therefore in the context of criminal sanctions for copyright offences, that this provides a suitable precedent for using it in registered design sanction”.

Truer words were never spake. That is exactly the case that many of us have been making. However, I do not believe that the remainder of that paragraph holds water in the context of copyright law and the ability to enforce it in relation to substantial copying in these circumstances. The term works for the criminal offence in copyright and I see no reason why it should not also work for registered design criminal liability.

I also regret that unregistered designs have not been given greater protection under the Bill. BIS figures, which were very recently welcomed by the Minister, demonstrate that UK investment in intangible assets now totals some £137.5 billion. Of that, some 46% is protected by copyright, 21% by unregistered design rights and 21% by trademarks. That demonstrates why throughout the passage of the Bill I have supported the case for extending criminal sanctions for registered design infringement to unregistered designs. Those are vital matters of national investment. If anything, the addition of the word “intentionally” by the Government in the Commons, as reflected in Amendments 4, 6 and others, has strengthened the case for that protection under the criminal law.

I believe that the amendments relating to intentionality introduce unnecessary additional mens rea to the offence. It is a belt-and-braces approach to what I believe was already there. However, I do not see how, given its inclusion, the Government can still refuse to extend criminal penalties to unregistered designs. If someone has “intentionally”—that is, deliberately—set out to copy someone else’s work for their own commercial gain, it should not matter whether that work is protected by a registered design right or an unregistered design right. It has still been deliberately stolen. I repeat that these rights are extremely important for our national investment. I still live in hope that sense will prevail at some stage in the future and that our designers will be properly protected by the criminal law, as are trademark and copyright owners.

The one bit of good news for designers is the European Court of Justice Advocate-General’s decision today on the Karen Millen v Dunnes case. As we know, the majority of the UK’s designers rely on unregistered rights, so this has provided clarity and will strengthen the unregistered design right in that it is the totality of the design one holds which the law protects, not by eliminating individual parts of a design. There is some good news coming out of the ECJ but not out of the House today.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, in Committee, we opposed the criminalisation of the unauthorised copying of a registered design and the dealing with unauthorised copies. We also opposed any possibility that that might be extended to unregistered designs. To that extent, I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, who has just spoken at length and with passion about these issues, as he has throughout the passage of the Bill. I understand where he is coming from but we simply do not agree on this point.

On Report, although we lost in Committee in terms of these discussions, we decided that the best thing to do was to come back with a series of amendments which would try to moderate where the Government were trying to get to. When I introduced the first of these, I quoted the noted British designer, Sir James Dyson, who had written to many noble Lords on that occasion. He said:

“In the law relating to copyright, acts of unintentional infringement are excluded from criminal sanctions. In the proposed clause of the Intellectual Property Bill relating to registered design … the same is not true. If this Bill is passed unamended, innocent designers will be threatened with criminal proceedings. It is wholly wrong that a designer should go to prison for unintentional infringement. The current wording of the Bill does not exclude that possibility”.

He continued:

“I have spent decades fighting to protect my ideas; taking on competitors who have flagrantly copied my patents and designs. I abhor intellectual property infringement. It is something I feel passionately about. But the Intellectual Property Bill’s inclusion of proposals to criminalise infringement of registered designs is a serious mistake”.

Our argument on this issue is, in essence, that the legislation would open a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences, potentially discouraging the very kind of legitimate, competitive risk-taking that policymakers have been very keen to encourage as a driver of growth. In particular, I said that this could be a deterrent to inward investment in UK design, which may not only result in an innovation drought but threaten the future employability of UK designers. I thought then, and I still believe, that the Government had failed to make their case.

However, notwithstanding the reservations, we also argued that if criminal sanctions were to be introduced we wanted to raise the bar to criminal proceedings by making it clear that they would be commenced only if it was clear beyond reasonable doubt that the action taken had been persistent, calculated and motivated by evidence of an intention to exploit the original registered design.

In that debate, the Minister said he would give serious consideration to the concerns that we expressed, and he brought forward an amendment at Third Reading which would introduce a defence of reasonable belief that the design in question was not infringed. While we were happy to sign up to that amendment, which raised the bar as we wished, we said that it did not go far enough.

We are therefore very pleased that with these new Commons amendments the Government have returned to what is in effect the original IPO consultation document, which for example promised that the criminal offence would contain defences,

“against unintentional infringement of registered design rights”.

We are therefore pleased to agree with the new amendments to Clause 13, which specify intentionality—that the act of copying must be a considered act—and define how close to the original the copied design would need to be by reference to terms currently used in the relevant legislation. We continue to oppose the introduction of criminal sanctions for registered design infringement as a matter of principle. However, we will support the changes to the Bill.