Copyright and Rights in Performances (Personal Copies for Private Use) Regulations 2014

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Tuesday 29th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Con)]

My Lords, I find myself agreeing with so much of what the previous speakers have said. What I have not got at any time from the Government since the publication of the discredited Hargreaves report is any sense that there is a public interest in investment in content and that thereafter it becomes available in forms of which those who have invested are in control.

What has been unleashed is a global army of parasites who live off the investment that creative people have made in the UK and throughout the world. I publicly described Google as a parasite. I was picked up by one of its leaders, who asked: “Why did you describe us as parasites?”. I said, “Last week you used a clip of Susan Boyle on ‘Britain’s got Talent’ and had 300 million hits on YouTube. That piece of material cost us a great deal of money, you did not ask permission, and you put it out there to promote YouTube and Google’s fortunes”. He replied, “Well, if you had called us, we would have taken it down”. I replied, “If I go to Harrods and steal a Cartier watch; if they ring me up and say ‘Can we have it back?’, and I give it back it is not shoplifting”. What the Government have failed to understand throughout their deliberations on copyright since the Hargreaves report is that there is a direct correlation between investment and the investor’s ability to control and police its copyright, and to protect that investment to ensure that it gets value for it.

The Government seem to think in all the deliberations that I have heard, read and seen that there should be a free for all, that everything should be made free for the public and that there is a public interest in everything being made available as easily and freely as possible. Yes, there is a public interest in that but it will last about five years because in the end there will be no more investment in original content.

Throughout the creative industries, particularly the film, television and games industries, people are struggling to avoid piracy, and struggling to get value for the risk investment that they have made in the content. Since that wretched Hargreaves report, I have heard nothing from the Government to suggest that they understand that there is a public interest in continued investment in the creative industries.

Today’s Motion is yet another step forward in liberalising the copyright laws and chipping away at one of the great success stories. On the one hand, this Government have been tremendous at supporting the creative industries. I myself, as chairman of Pinewood Studios, have been a beneficiary of that, so I should declare an interest. But at the same time the Government are demonstrating a complete ignorance of the economics of investment in the creative industries. Today’s Motion is yet another example. It is time they tore up the Hargreaves report and listened to the people who make the investments. Then we might get some serious deregulation and some serious thinking about how we can modernise the copyright laws. But if this continues, I have to tell the Government that they are putting the creative industries at risk.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I want to say a few things about this subject, because everyone seems to be so much against these regulations. I, and many other members of the technical community and the general public, welcome them, as they bring some common sense into an area in which the world has moved on from the days of the printing press. That was when copyright was first conceived. Those old laws managed to adapt to encompass the physical sale of performances that were recorded, such as music, films and so on. But now, in the internet age, they need some major modernising modifications.

One thing keeps coming up and causing confusion, and I want to talk about it up front, because I have great difficulty getting my head round it, and I think a lot of other people do too. The terms “creators” and “rights holders” keep getting put together as if they meant the same thing. They do not. There are the talented performers, who might actually have been put together by programme creators and producers. Then there are the rights holders, who buy rights to the performances, and the distributors, who also take a chunk or two. How many of the talented performers have gone bust? They often go broke quite early, because they have sold all their rights. Yet that is what the rest are all feeding off. When I hear all this great cry about how badly the poor rights holders are suffering, I sometimes look at some of those broken performers who at some point have performed brilliantly, but who at the end of the day have been milked dry. So I am sorry, but I do not always listen to those cries of woe.

The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, asked why we do things differently from some other members of the EU. There is a clever idea—I think that this is what they did with Philips cassette tapes—whereby people put a levy on every bit of hardware. That is all supposed to go into a big pot to reward the creative industries, which get the benefit of it. But that means the big boys again. The trouble is that this puts extra cost on to every bit of equipment—every iPhone, every iPad, every Microsoft Surface, and everything else that I buy. The trouble is that these things break down with monotonous regularity.

Let us say that I go and buy myself an MP4 player and download some music on to it, and then it breaks down. That causes problems, particularly if you are involved in one of those proprietary chains. If the device breaks down and you have to move on to another one, you often have to pay again—and if it is all wrapped up in the hardware levy, you are paying again and again. All that does is inflate the cost of the machines—the gadgets that we buy.

That is a brake on innovation, productivity and so on among the small people and the small businesses, who cannot afford to be shelling out the whole time. I have seen reports that had different statistics from those in all the others, and suggested that if the EU were to remove those levies, it would be better off by nearly €2 billion a year. I have no idea whether that is true—people may well be sitting in front of dartboards when they produce such figures—but it is probably just about as genuine as some of the others. Certainly, when you have a broken machine you suddenly find you have to pay out and buy the material again, because format-shifting is not allowed and the digital rights management is different. Some of that has now changed, and some of it is better.

Turning to the subject of parodies, I see satirical students taking clips from the internet and making mashups, which are wonderful and very interesting and bright. But all that is illegal. I can see that politicians want to protect themselves from that sort of stuff, but where would all those wonderful satirical programmes of the past be if we had not quietly permitted it? Now that we are trying to crack down on it, we have to be very careful. That is why I think exceptions for parody and artistic creativeness are essential.

If you copy a newspaper article or something like that, which is illegal, because you have some memorable, magical moments that you want to keep about your family, you will have to put it in a locker and store it, and you will have to keep format shifting and changing it to new media the whole time. But it will not last for ever as CDs will fall apart after a number of years. The original newspaper will fall apart in 50 to 100 years and will be unreadable. If you have it electronically, that will fall apart unless you keep moving it. If it becomes illegal to copy, you will lose those memories and everything like that. The trouble is that most people are getting around these things in practical ways but what they are doing is illegal and, in some cases, illegal under the Digital Economy Act. Under that Act, certain things that used to be a civil offence became a criminal offence and the waters were muddied even more.

The really important thing is that if the law creates rules and laws which diverge significantly from the way in which the general public behave, the rule of law falls into disrepute and people start to disregard it. When that happens, they start to pick and choose which laws they will obey. I do not think that that is a good principle. There are moments when we have to admit that the world has moved on, although that means tough luck on some people. We see retrospectivity the whole time in a lot of areas. For example, as regards leases, rentals, landlords, tenants and all sorts of other arrangements, the Government have interfered with contracts that were set up and they have tampered with them in such a way that you no longer have protection of your own property, which you used to have. In general, they say that provisions apply only to new contracts but very often they tamper with existing ones. We have been tampering retrospectively for a very long time. I do not like it and I disapprove of it but sometimes we have to do it in order for the law to catch up with what is happening anyway.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I thank colleagues for the points raised in this debate and for the high level of technical expertise that they have shared with me, so new to the Dispatch Box. First, I will address some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. As noble Lords know, the Government support growth of the creative industries in multiple ways. I am a new and passionate advocate for doing this broadly and through intellectual property. We recently announced £16 million of funding from the Employer Ownership of Skills pilot to boost skills in the creative industry sector. We have welcomed the launch of the Creative Content UK scheme and have provided £3.4 million to co-fund the Creative Content UK educational campaign. The campaign will help to reduce online copyright infringement and to promote the use of legal digital content, which is an important theme of this debate.

The Government have welcomed the industry-published creative industries strategy and will continue to work with industry to help to achieve the growth and export success outlined in the vision and strategy for 2020. The IPO, along with other government departments, is fully involved with this strategy. In thanking the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for his kind words about my potential role as the Minister for the IPO, I remind the House that my friend in the other place, Ed Vaizey, now is also a Minister of State in the business department as well as at DCMS. On arriving in the department, he gave me helpful suggestions about who I should see and talk to. Joined-up government can work and it is our determination that we will make it work.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, expressed his regret, as did some others, as to why the Government were using secondary legislation rather than primary legislation for these measures. I repeat the point—that he indeed has made—that changes have been carefully developed with wide and extensive consultation. We have also published the draft regulations for technical review and have welcomed many debates in this House and the other place.