Intellectual Property Bill [Lords]
Debate between Helen Goodman and Mike Weatherley(10 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in the debate. I agree with everything my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) said at the beginning of the debate and am pleased to see a joined-up approach between the teams from the Departments for Business, Innovation and Skills and for Culture, Media and Sport.
As the hon. Member for Burnley (Gordon Birtwistle) has said, protecting intellectual property is essential in the modern, knowledge-based economy. It is particularly important in the creative industries, which support 1.5 million jobs and produce about £36 billion-worth of output.
The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) described the problem of illegal downloads, but he did not tell the House how large the number of illegal downloads is when aggregated. Ofcom estimates that, every three months, 280 million music tracks, 52 million television programmes, 29 million films, 18 million e-books and 7 million games are downloaded from sites without payment. It also estimates that about a fifth of households in this country go to those sites and do not pay for content. On behalf of the music recording industry, the BPI estimates that that costs the industry £250 million a year.
In the wash-up at the end of the previous Parliament, Labour and the Conservatives—the two major parties—agreed to pass the Digital Economy Act 2010. Unfortunately, the Government have been extremely dilatory in implementing its provisions. I am not saying that the provisions are perfect in every respect and that they do not need amendment, but the Government’s failure to get to grips properly with illegal downloading will cost the industry more than £1 billion in the lifetime of this Parliament.
The Government’s measures will not come into effect until the end of the next calendar year. They propose a voluntary code for ISPs. Under the Bill, the ISPs would notify people three times, after which the copyright holders of illegally downloaded content can call for slow connections, disconnections and so forth.
I do not agree with the proposals of the hon. Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley), the Prime Minister’s adviser, because he has brought no common sense to the debate. It is important that we distinguish between 14-year-olds in their bedrooms downloading two or three Justin Bieber tracks on to an iPod and people who make multi-billion pound businesses out of providing illegal material. It is not right to treat the two groups in the same way. We need measures that address the audience, who are unconscious of what they are doing, and the industry, which knows perfectly well what it is doing and is utterly disingenuous. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) is mithering from a sedentary position. I am not saying that there should not be a penalty for the teenagers downloading material illegally, but I am saying that we should regard the problem much as we regard driving fines—we should have a points system building up to fines.
Mike Weatherley
My point was that, when we get the education right and people understand that stealing intellectual property is wrong, and when the industry has alternative downloading models, if we exhaust fines and other means of stopping persons downloading illegally, we must consider some sort of custodial sentence for persistent offenders and people who operate on a commercial scale.
Helen Goodman
The point is that the people operating on a commercial scale are in a different category and should be dealt with much more severely. I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman that education must be part of that strand, but I am uneasy about switching off the internet because, for example, the 12-year-old little sister of a 16-year-old who illegally downloads pop music might be unable to upload her school home work. That does not seem to be the right way to go about dealing with the problem. But if the governing party wants to charge into criminalising every teenager in the land—well, that is an election opportunity for them.
To make any of this happen, it is obvious that we must reform the Intellectual Property Office, which does not have an important role at the moment. The hon. Member for Hove said nothing about what should be done with respect to the industry. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire was absolutely right: we must have an EU approach. I know that that pains Ministers and means that they will have to see off the wilder shores of Euroscepticism, but this is a perfect example of where we need to see a European approach. Two points are particularly important: blocking sites that give people access to material they do not pay for; and requiring search engines to change their algorithms to prioritise legal sites. It is completely disingenuous for them to say, “Oh, we have received 5 million notifications and blah-de-blah-de-blah.” We all know that this is the root cause of the problem, so let us tackle it.
We must remember that this industry is one engine of growth in the British economy, but we must also take seriously the needs and the role of researchers in universities and in the British Library. We must update the law to allow them to have what they need: text mining for non-commercial research; heritage protection by digitising material; a workable private copying regime; and ensuring that the law overrides private contracts on digital material. The Hargreaves report came up with a number of proposals. Some were sensible—on orphan works and digital exchange—while others were perhaps more controversial, but one point on which I think we can all agree is that we do not wish to move the British economy to a litigious model, with the levels of litigation that are prevalent in the United States.
What I will say now relates in part to unregistered design. I have a concern about people putting patents on things that are part of the common culture, either here or overseas. For example, the recipe for a cucumber sandwich or people singing “Ring a Ring O’ Roses” at a children’s birthday party are a part of the common culture. Those examples might seem a little fanciful to hon. Members, but I will provide two examples where the common culture has been appropriated by some people to their financial benefit, and not necessarily to the financial benefit of all.
In the 1950s, some people collecting folk songs went to Teesdale in my constituency. They went right to the top of the dale and met some stonemasons. They got the stonemasons to sing songs and recorded them. They took the recordings away and shared them with people making music. One of the songs they recorded was “Scarborough Fair”. This was given to Simon and Garfunkel, who of course made an absolute fortune with it, and the stonemasons in my constituency made absolutely nothing. I think Simon and Garfunkel are great and they made a lovely production of the song, but it was a part of our common culture.
Today, we see this kind of thing going on in other industries. Sometimes there are glamorous models shimmying along the catwalk wearing prints that, not to put too fine a point on it, have been ripped off from people in Africa. The people in Africa, who have been making the prints for generations, get nothing, but the people who reproduce them patent the design and make an absolute fortune. I am sure that hon. Members agree that this need not to patent the common culture is something that we need to keep in our minds, so that we do not shift from one situation that deprives people who are genuinely making new, scientific innovations and discoveries, to a situation where we put legal attributions on every single idea and part of the common culture.