Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Clement-Jones

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, in moving the amendment, I wish to speak also to Amendment 28B.

Since I tabled these amendments, we have had a Christmas present from the ministry. On 20 December, the Secretary of State was kind enough to announce a package of intentions to reform copyright which entirely supersedes my Amendment 28B. Therefore, I will not trouble the Committee by addressing that because clearly we will see this in a proper and thought through form when we come to the Bill that will follow the announcements made by the Secretary of State. However, we have a small cameo performance on copyright now before we go to bed. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm that the 28th of this month will be the next day in Committee, since clearly this stage of the Bill is now going to go into 10 sittings. If there is any suggestion that there will be a day in between, will we all receive an e-mail notification rather than having to spot that something has changed on the Order Paper?

It seems to me that copyright is aptly described by Macaulay. A lot of people speak as if copyright is a god-given possession of creative people. It is not; it is a deal done between those who consume copyright material—I both produce and consume copyright material—and those who produce it. In order that it should be produced, those who consume are prepared to let the copyright owners have a limited monopoly on it, but that monopoly is not without terms. It is given in order that it should be available for consumption. The way in which people want to consume copyright material is therefore an important part of negotiating and renegotiating the bargain between users and producers of copyright material.

My firm view, which, to judge from his 20 December announcements, is shared by the Secretary of State, is that we should look at copyright as a means of increasing national wealth, not just of producing a nice little rose garden to enable creative people to live comfortably and have everything exactly the way that they want it. It is a bargain between two sides. It is an agreement to use something that is essentially an evil—a monopoly—in order to enable something good to happen. My view, like that of the Secretary of State, which is covered in Amendment 28B, is that we must from time to time look at the way in which copyright functions in this country and ask whether it is serving the interests of users as well as those of the people who create it. In the case of fair use, quite clearly the rules had begun to fall well short of the way in which people wanted to use copyright material. We all own a reasonable variety of devices. If we buy a copy of Beethoven’s ninth symphony by the London Symphony Orchestra, we ought to be able to listen to it on various devices; we do not want to have to buy separate copies for separate devices. Therefore, we must make it possible for users to do that because that is the way that users want to consume material and that is part of the modern bargain.

Amendment 28A covers something that the Secretary of State has not touched on but which others will be aware of. In the days of books—and long may they continue—when you bought a book, you owned it. You could pass it on to other people, you could sell it second-hand, you could leave it in your will—it was a possession. Now if you buy a book for use on your Kindle it remains the property of Amazon, which can remove it at any time—and does. Amazon strips people of their whole libraries or removes individual books if something has gone wrong with the licensing. You do not own a book; you just have the right to consume it for a while. That is a fundamentally undesirable position when it comes to the relationship between the creator and the user.

Something that is for personal consumption ought to be a personal possession; it ought to be something that we can pass on to other people. We should not allow the position to persist where the balance has been shifted. We have allowed the change in technology to change the balance between the old regime that existed in the case of books, of ownership as a result of payment to one of leasing as a result of payment. We should encourage people to have libraries and pass on intellectual works they have created to other people. That is the right balance between users and creatives. I want to restore the balance in the case of modern technology to where it was in the case of the old technology. Although I know I will not achieve anything this time with this amendment, I hope we will see something, if not from this Secretary of State then a future one. It is certainly a matter I will raise when we next debate this Bill. I beg to move.

[Lord Clement-Jones]

My Lords, it would be a shame not to savour the final quarter-hour of Committee today—although I have probably learnt more about agriculture than I ever wished to. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is still here; he is clearly incredibly versatile in all these matters. Seeing him and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, I am afraid that I am reminded of the passage of the Digital Economy Bill, which may or may not be a good thing. As we know from that, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is never knowingly underprovocative, particularly on the question of intellectual property rights, and I am not going to enter the lists with him on the issue of the format-shifting exception that was the subject of the Christmas present he mentioned.

Amendment 28A is an incredibly sweeping amendment that would have a massive impact on the cloud computing industry in the UK, which is forecast to grow from something like £2 billion to £6 billion. It would have an incredibly damaging effect, which makes it highly undesirable for various commercial reasons. Quite frankly, it also happens to be in contravention of the existing EU directive on computer software, which gives the exclusive rights to copyright owners in those circumstances. Of course, there are issues about the ownership of digital content, but this is not the way to deal with them. There are issues about who owns what you have on your iPad or tablet from other manufacturers, but this is an incredibly sweeping way to do it. In the way the amendment is phrased, I doubt whether it will cure the issue by itself.