Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I rise not least for the pleasure of supporting entirely what my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones and the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, have just said. This is a very present problem in the way that the world is developing. We are getting some very large corporations controlling a lot of the flow of copyright material. The noble Lord mentioned the likes of Facebook but Amazon is just as bad, given the rights you are left with as an author as it moves into the publishing of e-books. If you put an e-book through to Amazon, you have to sign over to Amazon the entire control over what your work is sold for. The terms that it goes for are most astonishing. Generally, we need to remember that copyright is about enabling people to create and remunerating them properly for it, not enabling vast corporations to reap the benefits that we intend for the creators. I entirely support this change and very much hope that the Government, if not accepting this exact amendment, will see their way to doing something equivalent.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, a change to the scope of the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, as envisaged by this amendment, would warrant considerable investigation and public consultation. For example, contracts governing copyright are specifically excluded from that Act. The Government would need to assess the potential implications of amending the Unfair Contract Terms Act to insert copyright within the scope of that Act. We believe that we understand the intent behind this amendment, which is to address issues surrounding contracts between individual creators and other businesses. However, it is unclear whether the amendment achieves this, since some parts of the Unfair Contract Terms Act would not apply to business-to-business contracts. I would be very happy to have further discussions on this complex matter with my noble friends Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Lucas, and indeed with the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. I hope that in the light of the above, my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones will be able to withdraw his amendment.