Trade Marks (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018

Debate between Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Puttnam

Monday 14th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Clement-Jones]

I cannot answer that question. I think that these have been drawn up in an attempt to be constructive. I do not think the initial thought was that these were going to create difficulties for business. The trouble is that at the end of the day any business, when it is looking at its intellectual property, is going to prefer to stay in the EU rather than come out, so there is a fundamental aspect of this which is not business-friendly. I can see what the noble Lord is driving at, but this measure is an attempt to be constructive in circumstances where it is very difficult to get a decent result.

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, on that point, I have spent the last 50 years of my life earning my living as a result of intellectual property. It is almost impossible to explain to noble Lords and the Minister how fundamental the harmonisation of intellectual property and the clear, clean flow of revenues generated by it is to the financing, never mind the issue of recruitment, of material for film, television and associated industries.

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Puttnam

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 20th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, is too modest about his drafting—I think that this is one of the most important amendments to the Bill that we have seen to date. I am just sorry that we were not quick enough off the mark to put our name to it. I do not know which hand the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, is using—there seem to be a certain number of hands involved in this—but anybody who has read Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things, as I did over the weekend, would be utterly convinced of the need for a code of ethics in these circumstances. The increasing use of data in artificial intelligence and algorithms means that we need to be absolutely clear about the ethics involved in that application. The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, mentioned a number of codes that he has based this amendment on, but what I like about it is that it does not predicate any particular code at this stage. It just talks about the desirable architecture of the code. That makes it a very robust amendment.

Like the noble Lord, I have looked at various other codes of ethics. For instance, the IEEE has rather a good code of ethics. This is all of a piece with the stewardship council, the data ethics body that we debated in the previous day in Committee. As the Royal Society said, the two go together. A code of ethics goes together with a stewardship council, data ethics committee or whatever one calls it. You cannot have one without the other. Going forward, whether or not we agree today on this amendment, it is very clear that we need to keep coming back to this issue because this is the future. We have to get it right, and we cannot prejudice the future by not having the right ethical framework.

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, I support this amendment and identify myself totally with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. I am trying to be practical, and I am possibly even pushing at an open door here. I have a facsimile of the 1931 Highway Code. The introduction by the then Minister says:

“By Section 45 of the Road Traffic Act, 1930, the Minister of Transport is directed to prepare a code of directions for the guidance of road users … During the passage of the Act through Parliament, the opinion was expressed almost universally … that much more could be done to ensure safety by the instruction and education of all road users as to their duties and obligations to one another and to the community as a whole”.


Those last few words are very important. This must be, in a sense, a citizens’ charter for users—a constantly updated notion—of the digital environment to be sure of their rights and of their rights of appeal against misuse. This is exactly where the Government have a duty of care to protect people from things they do not know about as we move into a very difficult, almost unknown digital environment. That was the thinking behind the 1931 Highway Code, and we could do a lot worse than do something similar. That is probably enough for now, but I will undoubtedly return to this on Report.