25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Lord Berkeley of Knighton Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Lane-Fox for bringing to bear her expertise, which I hope to test further towards the end of my three minutes.

Education is at the root of so much with which we concern ourselves in this House. What is the greatest prerequisite of education? I say that it is curiosity. When we think that, thanks to the web and the internet, I can in a second summon up a page of an original Bach manuscript, look at a detail of a Leonardo da Vinci sketch or put in a line of Shakespeare and have the context quoted back to me almost immediately, it is little wonder that students and children, young and old alike, find tuition and research on the web. We owe much to it for that.

Even your Lordships, when they cannot be here for a whole day, can keep au fait with what is going on in this House and, perhaps more fundamentally, taxpayers can see what we are up to and what Members are up to in the other place. I often wonder what Moses might have thought, had he had access to the web, and how much trouble it would have saved him, but then he probably would have been rather horrified at the way the commandments are being broken on the web as well as acceded to. Certainly, to pick up on an earlier remark, this morning’s news item from the Philippines is a good example of things that we have to be careful about and legislate against, for the web is a double-edged sword.

If I might speak now as a composer, there are problems. Frankly, I am hugely flattered when I find that people have accessed my music, legally or illegally, on the web. My publishers, record companies and instrumental players and singers are slightly less happy, because they do not get the rewards due to them. Here comes my challenge to my noble friend and to the Minister: really, there is a problem here. I love it that so many people come into my shop, if you like, but it is a worry that they can take things off the shelves without paying for them—a worry not only for the people I mentioned but for the bills that other composer colleagues have to pay. As the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, we have not managed to deal with copyright exception measures, especially the copyright infringement provisions, which have not yet been implemented.

I know that this is a very difficult area to police, but if the noble Baroness and, in particular, the Minister, would look at this area, they would be doing good to a section of the creative industry that brings a huge amount into the economy, whether it be the Beatles, Radiohead, Coldplay, Peter Maxwell Davies or Harrison Birtwistle. You need to protect that which we are bringing into your economy.