Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Lord Grade of Yarmouth Excerpts

Wednesday 14th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth]

I hope noble Lords will agree that it is not contentious to say that the creative industries in this country are vital to our economy. They employ 2 million people and account for 6% of GDP. It is a growth sector that must be allowed to flourish. The creative industries can be defined as those that create copyright. Therefore, we should tinker with copyright legislation only with great care. I regret that I am in no doubt that proposals in this Bill would stem this growth by undoing the copyright framework that underpins the sector. I concur fully with everything that my noble friend Lady Buscombe said about extended collective licensing, and I fully support the remarks of my noble friend and erstwhile colleague Lord Clement-Jones.

Clause 68 would allow companies to license intellectual property belonging to others, and to set prices and terms for this property. Clause 66 would pave the way for statutory instruments to enable widespread free usage of copyright material. All of this would be economically damaging and morally wrong. I have yet to meet any serious commercial investor in new content who is not petrified by the potential unintended consequences of these measures. They seem to be designed to introduce the flawed Hargreaves report by the back door.

If someone invests in creating original material, and then invests further to digitally preserve it so that it can be licensed to others, that individual or company has a right to expect a full commercial return on their creative and financial investment. It seems to me that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has neglected its remit for business in favour of pursuing fashionable and ill founded innovation. The beneficiaries are likely to be companies such as Google and other international corporations that live off the backs of British creative industries on the internet.

Content companies across the media landscape questioned the unsound findings of the Hargreaves review. They voiced their concerns to the IPO in its consultation on copyright, and now they are perplexed at why legislation has sprung up in the Bill without the IPO having given an adequate response on its own consultation. Rather, the industry has been thrust into uncertainty about whether its continued investment in content is sustainable without important revenues from the licensing of its copyright material.

Industry innovators and investors are already developing business models and freeing up copyright content for widespread use. It is in their commercial interests to do so, and it does not require legislation. For example, the ITN archive was fully digitised last year in a multimillion pound project. News clips from 30,000 film cans and tapes dating back to 1955 are online for people to license at the click of a mouse. Other world-famous news agencies supply text, video and pictures from all over the globe to a host of UK companies. Without a robust intellectual property framework protecting those who make such investments, can we count on them continuing to keep making and investing in content? Film, TV and music companies, along with publishers, can continue to invest in new content only if they can be sure that copyright laws will enable them to earn the full rewards of that investment. If we dilute that certainty, as the Bill would inevitably do, we should understand the dire consequences for future investment in the most important growth sector of the UK economy: our creative industries.

I know from too many years of experience in content industries around the world that there is a queue of parasites waiting to pounce on and leech off other companies’ investments in the wild west of the web. The Bill provides a charter for companies such as Google to enjoy a free ride on the backs of our cherished creative investors. These clauses require very close scrutiny, and I urge the Government to listen carefully to the alarm bells that have rung around the Chamber today. I would be grateful if the Minister would indicate that the Government understand that there may well be unintended consequences following from these two clauses.