Lord Stevenson of Balmacara
Main Page: Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
My noble friend is right to support our creative industries—our musicians, our writers—and this is at the heart of our policy on intellectual property. One of the reasons we set up PIPCU was to put more focus into this area. Crime has moved online and we have to change the way in which we help our writers. But our attitude in Britain is right and strong.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)
My Lords, the problem is more complex, is it not? Noble Lords will be aware that the IP crime statistics are deficient in the sense that they do not collect separately details of cybercrime. We therefore have no real baseline against which we might operate. The ONS piloted a new scheme last year which revealed that there were about 5.1 million instances of fraud and 2.5 million instances of computer misuse per year. So there is a gap here and I wonder whether the Minister could respond on that. Secondly, could she say a little more on penalties, where the City of London Police have also identified a gap? IP offences attract a maximum 10-year prison sentence but online copyright infringement—one of the points just made by the noble Lord—attracts a maximum of only two years. That seems a bit of a discrepancy.