Intellectual Property

Debate between Eric Joyce and Pete Wishart

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[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.

[Eric Joyce (Falkirk) (Lab)]

Has the hon. Gentleman considered the fact that parody is supposed to be rib-tickling?

[Pete Wishart]

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has mentioned that, because I intend to give an example of something that is really rib-tickling. I will explain how things work without an exception. Say that you wanted to parody the work of some famous group, Mr Caton. Let us take one at random. Let me see. How about the world’s only parliamentary rock band, the fantastic MP4? Say that you wanted to parody one of its fantastic works—perhaps even one penned by the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan). If you were intending to do that parody, you would come to me and the hon. Gentleman and ask us, and we, being reasonable folks, would agree to you doing that. If it became a worldwide hit—with your involvement, Mr Caton, there would be a very good chance of that—we would get our share and you would get your share. It would be absolutely fair. That is what professional parodists do now, and it works. Any suggestion that somehow our parody industry, our comedy industry, is being restrained and constrained by the lack of an exception is utter nonsense.

The IPO tells us that an exception will be worth £600,000. That is what the whole of the UK television industry reckons is the value of new parody each year. Again, it is a nonsensical figure. That seems to be the case through the whole of the Hargreaves review when we look at the economic assumptions. Those economic assumptions disappear as quickly as snaw off a dyke when put under any sort of challenge or assertion. For the benefit of my good friends in Hansard, that is what we say in Perthshire for snow off a wall.