Arts and Creative Industries Strategy

Lord Leong Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise to my noble friend Lord Chandos and your Lordships’ House for my delayed arrival for the debate. I am grateful for the understanding shown to me on this occasion. I warmly congratulate my noble friend Lord Chandos on securing this debate, and I declare my interests as set out in the register.

As I listen to these excellent contributions, I am reminded of just how important the creative industries are to all aspects of our lives. We must never forget the many ways in which the creative sector enriches us through connection, escapism, solace, joy, insight into new worlds—real and imagined—and almost unlimited opportunities to expand our knowledge and understanding of the world.

Let us also remember that behind all the famous actors, musicians, writers, composers, artists and architects are hundreds of thousands of talented and passionate people who build, design, administrate, program, publicise and use any number of skills to realise a staggering range of creative experiences—each one contributing to an industry worth £116 billion to the UK economy.

I worked for many years in publishing, a sector that not only constitutes around £6.7 billion of this figure but is often a foundation for other areas of the creative industries. Harry Potter, for example, started as a series of novels and expanded into a £4 billion industry encompassing film, television, theatre and tourism. In fact, such is the power of this creative endeavour that, as a relative newcomer to this Chamber, I sometimes need to remind myself that I am not actually in Hogwarts.

The UK publishing sector supports 70,000 jobs across all regions of the country and exports more books than any other nation—flying the flag for British culture and language across the world, generating £3.8 billion in exports and reducing the UK’s trade deficit by 2.2%. One of the reasons for the success of British publishing is the UK’s gold-standard copyright and intellectual property regime, which ensures that creators are paid for their efforts and can continue creating. To retain our position as a global leader, we must ensure that this regime is protected by legislation that is fit for the challenges of the digital age.

I draw your Lordships’ attention to two important current issues: copyright exhaustion, and text and data mining. Currently, the UK’s copyright exhaustion regime prevents the unauthorised parallel import of international copies of books to the UK. This prevents wholesalers undercutting domestic sales by selling books tailored and priced for foreign markets. However, last year the Intellectual Property Office consulted on moving to an international exhaustion regime, which could lead to a loss of almost a third of the UK publishing sector’s total value, some £2.2 billion. Although the Government concluded that there was insufficient evidence to change the current regime—to a collective sigh of relief from all readers, authors, publishers and other creatives—the IPO has not yet announced its final decision. I urge the Minister and other noble Lords to call for the IPO to retain the current gold-standard regime, and not put thousands of jobs and billions of pounds of UK exports in danger and risk reducing the variety and quality of books available to British readers.

The second issue of concern is around text and data mining of digital content. Millions of people engage with authors’ work through screens and laptops rather than the printed page. UK publishers support innovation in artificial intelligence by licensing their research and datasets for text and data mining, which ensures that publishers and other rights holders are paid fairly for the use of their work. However, the IPO has proposed the introduction of a blanket copyright exception for text and data mining for any purpose. Under this proposal, tech firms could use machine learning to copy and monetise any UK-licensed creative content. In other words, having paid for the content just once, there would be nothing to prevent firms distributing this content potentially to millions of others. Depriving the original creators and rights holders of their income would self-evidently have terrible implications across the whole creative economy. Moreover, it would put the UK significantly out of step with similar creative economies and undermine investment in the content that innovative AI companies seek.

A broad coalition of professionals, from news publishing to music, and from magazines to photos, have called on the Government to reconsider these IPO proposals as a matter of urgency. I ask the Minister to join me in opposing both these proposals from the IPO, so that we safeguard the incredible creativity and innovation of our world-leading publishing sector and look forward to the enrichment, education and entertainment that it will bring to millions of lives in years to come.