Intellectual Property

Debate between Kevin Brennan and Eric Joyce

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Eric Joyce]

I hear what my hon. Friend says, but in debates about intellectual property and copyright, as we have seen today—with one exception, on the matter of parody—the traffic all goes one way. It is quite easy to understand the importance of copyright, intellectual property and the creative industries. Conversely, it is easy to label people who copy things without paying for them as pirates and say they are committing illegal acts. However, without lauding that, it is a fact that the internet is a fantastic copying machine, and that is what happens. If we want to criminalise everyone who does it, we are on a hiding to nothing. We are criminalising everyone’s children to start with.

People sometimes say, “It’s exactly the same as theft. People download a record track and don’t pay for it. That is money that the industry forgoes.” That is a highly debatable and questionable proposition. Frequently, people want their stuff to be spread around the place and be copied, because it encourages other revenue streams.

[Kevin Brennan]

Of course my hon. Friend makes a valid point about criminalising everyone’s children, but is not the issue that powerful business interests effectively direct those who are searching for something on the internet to illegal sites that do not just copy the odd thing, but are factories for ripping off people’s intellectual property rights; and that if companies such as Google were more responsible and had some corporate social responsibility they would not be directing people, effectively, to the illegal end of the market?

[Eric Joyce]

Again, I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. Let us consider the propositions that Google polices the entire internet or the realm that it can police, and that internet service providers make their own judgments about what they should close, and let us imagine that they close down domains and that people cannot access all sorts of things out there on the basis of judgments made by commercial entities. There is a trend in the governance of the internet by some countries to want heavily to regulate its use. Looking across the world, such Governments tend to be those who are not particularly democratic. In democratic states, the trend is to say that the internet should have a degree of laissez-faire and, as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn said—in many ways, they instigated the internet back in the ’60s and ’70s—it should be impartial as to its use and there should be no state governance.

That is the general assumption in theory in western and democratic states. However, we have heard the recent comments by the EU Justice Commissioner on the data protection directive on the right to be forgotten—that people should be able to take down accurate, legitimate data if they do not like having them up there and that they should be able to scrub out bits of history. Commercial interests want ISPs to police the internet and to take stuff down based on their commercial judgments, or that some Government-led body should make judgments about what is on the internet. The general trend is to have a high degree of directorial control by Governments over the internet and that sometimes extends to such corporate arguments.

[Kevin Brennan]

With your permission, Mr Caton, I have just googled “Empire State of Mind” by Alicia Keys and Jay-Z, and the first five results offered a free download of that track on Google. Why does a Google search not direct people to a legal site where they could purchase the track?

[Eric Joyce]

That is exactly the point I am making about censorship of the internet. The problem is that that is the way it is. In due course, industries will have to adapt to that way. The fact is that things will continue to be copied and industries with current business models will have to adjust. Of course, we have to do what we can within the realms of possibility to protect those industries but, inevitably, there will be a degree of evolution. Each time we have such a debate, the overwhelmingly dominant argument is for the protection of current business models, but people in those industries must know that things have to change.

Things will continue to be copied, and I would not advocate the degree of censorship of the internet that my hon. Friend seems to do. Essentially, it is straightforward for mirror sites to pop up, and it is virtually impossible to close down a site and prevent another one opening up to sell the same stuff. Yesterday, I thought that it would be quite interesting to set up an experiment with a page, with some people trying to keep the page alive and with the ISPs trying to close it down. I absolutely guarantee that those trying to keep that page up somewhere on the internet—it would inevitably appear in a Google search—would always win the day. The ISPs can close a site, but they cannot prevent the existence of the ideas in the site.

[Kevin Brennan]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way once again. May I clarify that I am not advocating censorship, as he put it, of the internet? I am simply saying that the corporate social responsibility of a large corporation would surely require it to ensure that its algorithms and systems generate a search that directs people to legal sites. Such corporations are perfectly capable of doing that, even if illegal searches appear way down in the list of pages. The fact that those sites are listed at the top—often in the paid advertising part of a Google search, so contributing to Google’s profitability—does not show corporate social responsibility.

[Eric Joyce]

I am not sure that my hon. Friend is right about paid advertisements for illegal sites. I entirely understand the frustration at the Google algorithm producing sites that have unlawful content—we are talking about unlawful rather than legal content—but he is advocating censorship of the internet. Google would have to censor hundreds of thousands or millions of sites out there.

I am currently on the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions. It is interesting that its members are sometimes tempted to say, “Hang on, we could censor that, because that is done in China or because Twitter now has a new business model so that it can constrain certain types of tweets—especially those with references to religion or politics—for regimes in certain parts of the world.” It is true that Twitter could do that and that Google could constrain what is said on the internet, but we have to look at the flipside and ask whether that is particularly healthy in a democratic society.