All 1 Duke of Somerset contributions to the Digital Economy Act 2017

Read Bill Ministerial Extracts

Thu 2nd Feb 2017
Digital Economy Bill
Lords Chamber

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords

Digital Economy Bill Debate

Full Debate: Read Full Debate

Digital Economy Bill

Duke of Somerset Excerpts
Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Thursday 2nd February 2017

(7 years, 9 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Digital Economy Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: HL Bill 80-III Third marshalled list for Committee (PDF, 262KB) - (2 Feb 2017)
Lord Maxton Portrait Lord Maxton
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

My Lords, I too support this amendment, but—there is a “but” to it—there are of course two types of e-books. There are those physical books which have been transferred over and copied into an e-system, but there are also increasingly a number of authors who write an e-book directly; they do not publish them at all in written form. I am not sure that this amendment takes account of the fact that there are increasingly these two different types of e-books.

Secondly, the fact is that Amazon which, rightly or wrongly, is the major contributor to the e-book revolution—I have a Kindle in my own pocket, which I read, and I have never picked up a book since I bought it—does not take part in the British national library system at all, as far as I am aware, although it does in America. Increasingly, Amazon is setting up its own lending system, where you can borrow an e-book from Amazon for a relatively small sum of money. You can only borrow it for three or four weeks at a time, but you can borrow it directly from Amazon. I have just a quick question to the Minister. Is there any progress in terms of Amazon becoming part of the system? I gather that one of the problems is that it uses a different type of e-book to the one that is used by the public libraries in this country.

Duke of Somerset Portrait The Duke of Somerset (CB)
- Hansard - -

My Lords, I intervene briefly to support this amendment, which seeks to rebalance the need for public access to all types of books against authors’ rights to some modest payment for their work. The PLR gives authors a small income where their books are sold mainly to libraries. The main point is that the PLR was extended to audiobooks in the 2010 Act for on-site loans but the need here is to extend it to remote loans, an area quickly increasing in popularity where items are downloaded to a computer situated away from the library.

We heard that zero remuneration is now illegal after the European Court of Justice ruling last November, so I expect that the Minister will have no difficulty in accepting this simple but important amendment. However, that ruling also drew attention to the difficulty of ensuring that only one copy is downloaded and that after expiration of the lending period no further listening can be enabled. Could the Minister indicate how this might be enforced or will it probably just be ignored?

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Portrait Lord Stevenson of Balmacara
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

My Lords, briefly, I apologise to the House for the brevity of our Amendment 79B. We ran out of time and did not have the skills or ability to write an amendment that should properly have been in the Budget. We also lacked the temerity to do that. It is an aspiration not a probing amendment; it does not even qualify for that. It is a flag-waving exercise as we ought to think harder about the tax on knowledge. As the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, said absolutely rightly, it is ridiculous that we believe that books in physical form somehow transmit knowledge and are worthy of having a VAT-exempt regime but when they are downloaded they must be subject to VAT. That seems unfair. We support Amendment 74 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and look forward to hearing the responses from the noble Baroness.