Intellectual Property

Debate between David Simpson and Pete Wishart

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Pete Wishart]

Once again, the hon. Gentleman is spot on. I saw the report by Consumer Focus, and disappointing is hardly the word that I would use to describe it. We are talking about illegal activity, which is what happens when people pirate the work of others and try to give it away for nothing.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate, and I speak today in support of Ulster Scots music. When getting UK intellectual property accepted in other countries, especially the US, there is a large differential when it comes to patents because they cost between three and five times more than in any other country.

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about the value of patents to the UK economy. Hargreaves described patents in several choice words and phrases, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has paid close attention to the drift of Government policy. The attitude and policy towards patents that we are beginning to observe are alarming.

Let me say a little about why I have called this debate. I remember turning on the BBC news and thinking that it was great that the Prime Minister was taking an interest in intellectual property—I do not think that I had ever heard a Prime Minister hold a press conference on the issue. He was alleging that restrictive practices in our intellectual property laws would stop the emergence of something similar to Google in the United Kingdom, and he tasked Ian Hargreaves to look at intellectual property laws and our copyright regime to see if something could be done to amend the laws and regulations.

Ian Hargreaves was notionally in charge of that process, but having observed evidence being taken, and the report and recommendations be delivered, I suggest that the hand of the Intellectual Property Office was all over it. I believe that Ian Hargreaves was perhaps a figurehead, because the IPO seems to have driven the agenda. We will discuss some of the exceptions to copyright that the IPO proposed as part of its consultation, but it has been steering the process all the way through.

What is that predicated on? It is predicated on the belief that economic evidence should be at the heart of every initiative and everything that we do concerning intellectual property law. Ian Hargreaves has been perhaps a little cavalier when it comes to intellectual property, and we could say that he has made heroic assumptions about the value of some of the proposed recommendations and exceptions. Perhaps his most heroic statement claimed that if the Government implemented all the recommendations, GDP would increase by 0.6%. That is a huge figure.

I do not know whether the Minister thinks that such assumptions are based on reality. I think—I am not absolutely sure—that the Business Secretary described such figures as “ballpark.” If that is ballpark, the ball has not only been hit for six but has gone right out of the stadium, such is the relationship to reality of some of the economic assumptions and analyses made by Professor Hargreaves.

Let me give the Minister a couple of examples that I find funny—one cannot look at Hargreaves’s economic assumptions and analyses without needing a good sense of humour, and I will get on to parody later in the debate. The first assumption that we should consider—perhaps the Minister can write to me if he thinks that it comes anywhere close to reality—relates to an exception for private copying for format shifting. It is incredible. We are told that implementing the recommendation for an exception for format shifting for private use would bring some £2 billion per annum to the UK economy by 2020. That extraordinary figure is arrived at by assuming that the absence of a private copying exception has been responsible for restraining lots of UK technology firms that have been bursting with ideas for new pieces of hardware. I think the contention is that the iPod could have been invented in this country if it were not for that pesky copyright rule, which everyone ignores anyway. Seemingly, if format shifting were dealt with, the UK would be flooded with innovations. Lots of brand-new and fantastic products would materialise; the iPod would be reinvented; and millions and millions of pounds would flow into the economy. That is evidence and economic analysis Hargreaves and IPO-style.

Then there is the real rib-tickling one—parody. It is said that an exception for parody would be worth £600,000. Do you want to know what that figure was predicated on, Mr Caton? This is quite funny. The figure is arrived at by first taking the total value of the global entertainment market, which I think the IPO reckoned was $2 trillion. It estimated that, with a parody exception, the UK’s share of that market could grow by up to 0.05%, translating into annual growth of £130 million to £650 million.