Intellectual Property Bill [Lords]

Debate between John Leech and Gerry Sutcliffe

Monday 20th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Sutcliffe]

I hope that we can say more later about the role of Google and the way in which it investigates, or rather does not investigate, the complaints that are made to it. I believe that millions of complaints have not been dealt with.

[Mr Leech]

I thank my fellow member of the Select Committee for his intervention. He will recall that we visited Google as part of our inquiry, and he will also recall the complacent attitude taken by its representatives to the whole issue, as though it had nothing to do with them and was not their problem. I think we all agreed that it certainly was their problem, and that they should take much more responsibility for tackling it.

Finally, I am disappointed that the Bill does not seek to repeal section 73 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which was intended to encourage the roll-out of the cable network in the United Kingdom, and allowed cable operators to re-transmit public service broadcasters’ programmes free of charge. At a time when Sky and Virgin are willingly entering into commercial deals with public sector broadcasters for their non-public sector broadcasting content, it is a nonsense that they are still able to make money on the back of free PSB content.