Intellectual Property Bill [Lords]

Debate between Gerry Sutcliffe and Pete Wishart

Monday 20th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I also belatedly welcome you, Madam Deputy Speaker, to the Chair. The appointment was perhaps a loss to the no campaign on the constitutional question, but one that we welcome.

I generally welcome the Bill. I have managed to speak in most of the debates on IP since becoming a Member of Parliament, and I have had the great pleasure of introducing a couple of them, but this is the first time in those 13 years that we have had a Bill dedicated to it. It gives us an incredible opportunity to assess the value of IP-supported business and industry to the economy. IP makes a fantastic contribution—4.3% of our GDP, as the Minister said.

[Mr Sutcliffe]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about the importance of IP rights. Does he agree that there is a need to educate most of the country, including young people, about the value and importance of IP rights?

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Gentleman is spot on. So much more could be done through educational initiatives. I have seen some important work being done. I have visited schools and seen schoolchildren trade marking their work with the little copyright symbol. They were starting to appreciate that what they produce, even if it is just a drawing, has an intrinsic intellectual value. If we can get across the message that intellectual property is as important as a property right, and if we can encourage that culture, we will be making great strides forward.

It has been reported in recent weeks that the creative sector has grown by 8.6% in recent years, compared with growth of only 0.7% in the general economy. It is the UK’s fastest growing sector and is worth around £71 billion a year. As the Culture Secretary has said, so much of our cultural and creative endeavour rests on important intellectual property rights, which is absolutely spot on. It is the creative industries that are growing us out of recession. Imagine growing our economy on the back of the creativity, talent and imagination of the people of this country. What a fantastic way to grow our economy. That is why it is so important that we get the intellectual framework right.

We have not done too much that is wrong over the past 10 years. The UK remains a leader. We are in the top three countries in practically every cultural discipline, whether music, film, television, publishing or whatever. We must be doing something right. It also comes naturally to people in these isles; we are just naturally creative. That is reflected in the great output we have seen over hundreds of years, in our contribution to invention, talent and creativity. We get something right and we are able to protect it, so we have to be very careful as we progress with intellectual property rights. We tamper with that at our peril. We have to be careful about how we progress.

The genesis of the Bill was in November 2010, when the Prime Minister made his great “Googlesburg” address. I remember coming home one evening and being unable to believe what I was seeing on the television: a UK Prime Minister talking about intellectual property. It was the first time I had seen a UK Prime Minister take an interest in intellectual property, which was great. I was also interested in what he was saying, because I wondered what on earth he was going on about. His basic premise seemed to be that we would never see a Google emerge in the UK because of our restrictive intellectual property laws and copyright framework. He did not say whether it would be a good thing to have a UK Google. The clear thing he said was that we would not be able to create a Google in the UK, and he also said something about our IP rules being restrictive and that they needed to be fixed.

I do not know who was advising the Prime Minister at the time, but it was certainly not the hon. Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley), who is now his adviser, because I know that the hon. Gentleman would never advise him to say such nonsense about the need for a Google to emerge in the UK—he would have advised him to say something much more sensible and measured. Was there perhaps somebody close to Google working at No. 10? Was somebody in a personal relationship with somebody working at No. 10 and advising the Prime Minister? I will leave that question hanging. Thank goodness the hon. Member for Hove is now advising him much more sensibly on such matters. [Interruption.] I see the Whip, the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), nodding her head. I will return to Google later, because there are lots of important things to be said about that. We have to understand what that has all been underpinned by and the impact and damage that type of process is having.

The Prime Minister then dispatched Ian Hargreaves to solve the Google conundrum. Ian Hargreaves rightly dumped all the Google nonsense as soon as he could. He went to the United States to see if he could introduce the American system of fair use into UK law. When he was prohibited from doing so because of very sensible European legislation, he moved on to the substance of his review by looking at IP’s economic contribution. He came up with 10 recommendations—some good, some bad, some indifferent and some repetitive—that the Government were minded to accept.

Since then, throughout the Hargreaves process, we have been in the business of legislating for those 10 recommendations. Some have required primary legislation, such as the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, and some have required secondary legislation. We are yet to see the statutory instruments, because the Hargreaves process has not concluded. We have this Bill and the SIs are coming forward. One thing that I would like the Minister to tell us—he can intervene now or answer when he responds—is what on earth is happening with the SIs for the rest of the copyright exceptions. He will probably say that they are still with parliamentary counsel and that they are not yet ready to be presented. Well, he had better get a move on, because he only has until March to do it.

I would like to hear about the process for introducing the SIs and what we should expect. I strongly suggest—several Members have said this several times to various Ministers—that we have separate SIs for each of the copyright exceptions. As a matter of principle, it is right and proper that we should be able to assess each of the exceptions individually. It would be unacceptable to bundle them together on a “take it or leave it” basis, particularly the new exceptions, and there are some really important ones, such as parody, copying and all the other ones—I cannot remember what they are, but the Minister knows what I mean. We have to ensure that we see them separately and debate them properly when they come through.

We are getting close to the end of the Hargreaves process. Has it been good? Yes, some of it has been all right. The digital copyright exchange is fantastic—a great little innovation. That part of the process has worked. However, there is a lot of nonsense—stuff that we did not need. In fact, great unhappiness has been caused among many people who represent our creative industries, because when they came to the Government stating their strong concerns about some aspects of Hargreaves they were arrogantly dismissed as though they—the people who have built the success of the industry—did not understand the environment they were working in and the Government or Hargreaves knew it better. There was a great deal of dissatisfaction among people who felt out of sorts with the way the Government went about this business. I hope that if we have a process such as this in future we will be able to look at things much more circumspectly and take everybody with us as we go forward.

I want to make a few remarks about how the Bill has been handled. It is an absolute disgrace that the House of Lords looked at this matter first: it should have been elected Members in this House. Given the value of the role that IP plays in industry and business, we should have considered it first, and if the House of Lords then wanted to look at it and suggest amendments and things we should reconsider, that would have been absolutely fine. Something as important as intellectual property and its contribution to the economy should have been handled first by directly elected Members rather than the House of Lords, talented and well respected as some of its Members may be. It should have been our right and our responsibility.

The Minister responsible for IP is an unelected Lord himself. The hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Jim Dowd) was spot on in his comments. The Minister is anonymous. Not even the Prime Minister could remember his name, so what chance have the rest of us got? It is great that the Minister for Universities and Science is here—who better to have dealing with a Bill on intellectual property than a Minister with a multiplicity of brains?—but the real IP Minister should be taking this Bill forward and held accountable through the questioning of this House’s directly elected Members.

That unelected Lord is a Minister in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which is responsible for the Intellectual Property Office despite the fact that the IPO deals with matters looked after by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. All the disciplines that the IPO manages and supports are covered by the DCMS, but the IPO is covered by BIS. Is anything as ridiculous as that? Surely we should be trying to bring this together, as suggested by the all-party intellectual property group. I see some of my fellow officers here; the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge is its secretary. DCMS would be the perfect fit for the IPO in ensuring that it could work beside all the industries it is there to support. I hope we can resolve this issue.

The all-party group also suggested that we should have an IP champion. If this is going to work cross-departmentally, we need somebody out there banging the drum for IP-supported business and industry. That is the great forgotten in all this. There are people here who are passionate about IP and recognise its value and importance, but the place should be mobbed—full to the gunwales. This is about billions of pounds and we have to get it right. The problem is that we have an anonymous Minister in a Department that does not serve the industry. We must get this fixed. We should make the hon. Member for Hove our IP champion—an IP tsar who is out there getting things sorted out. He was right to mention the IP tsar in the United States, who is doing a fantastic job. When the all-party group met her, we were all very impressed with the power and clout she has on Capitol Hill to get things done. That is what we need in this country—somebody who will work cross-departmentally to get things resolved and make sure that we are able to take this key matter forward.

On the Bill itself, I do not want to be repetitive—[Interruption.] Come on, let me get this properly into context. We have heard all about the sorts of things that the Bill does. It is great that it covers registered design rights—the great forgotten IP right. It is fantastic that ACID has at last got its way and that this will now be covered by criminal infringement provisions, but it is totally wrong that unregistered designs are not covered too. In the House of Lords there was a big debate about this on clause 13. There has also been a debate within the industry whereby a consensus has developed that if we are to pursue the idea of registered design rights, unregistered design rights must be included. The vast majority of people who work in the design industry are in small or micro-businesses with probably fewer than four people working for them, and they cannot spend so much time making sure that things are registered. We must get this resolved.