Intellectual Property (Hargreaves Report)

Debate between Mike Weatherley and Damian Collins

Thursday 7th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend makes a compelling point, which will have been heard by Ministers and search engine owners. I attended a briefing with the BPI, which represents the music industry, to talk about that very issue and was given a live demonstration, in which typing “download music” into Google meant that the predictive search came up with “download music for free”.

If we believe that technical measures should be used to restrict people from downloading content illegally, we should consult those who run search engines about the priority and ranking that they give to sites that direct people to sources where they can do that. That is a legitimate part of the debate, and search engine representatives should welcome it and be open to consultation with Government about it.

[Mike Weatherley (Hove) (Con)]

Is my hon. Friend aware of the traffic light proposals by the BPI and others that may go some way towards what he suggests?

[Damian Collins]

Yes, I am. It sounds like a sensible way forward. Those things are always best achieved in dialogue with the industry, through Ministers. That is often a much better approach than regulation and direct legislation, which, as we know from other remarks that have been made, can often be difficult to accomplish successfully. That dialogue is important. The companies concerned will have heard the remarks of my hon. Friends the Members for Hove (Mike Weatherley) and for Northampton South (Mr Binley).

Going back to my time in the advertising industry and to a case brought to me by a constituent, I can think of issues on both sides. A gentleman who runs a television business in Cheriton, Folkestone thought that a good way to sell the latest high-definition televisions would be to run an old-fashioned television next to a high-definition one, to show how that set revealed the improvement in the quality of the broadcast. Someone told him that he might need an entertainment licence to do that and that, for that simple demonstration in his shop, he would be charged several thousand pounds. He suggested that he would not do that, and a frank exchange of words was had—after which the problem seemed to go away. Nevertheless, he was potentially running foul of copyright laws.

Many people, if not in this room then elsewhere, will have put together a presentation for their work with images found on Google or elsewhere, and they will not have had a copyright licence to use them. I am sure that people of my generation can think of times when a friend lent them a tape-to-tape copy of some new musical work for their enjoyment, and they, too, would have been in breach of copyright regulations. Those issues have always existed. In some ways the digital economy brings them to a head. In the days when people made cassette copies for each other, peer to peer, the quality of reproduction was relatively poor. However, when the reproduction quality is almost perfect and a reproduction can be transmitted at any time at virtually zero—or actually zero—cost to people, with no effort, the market is changed dramatically. The ability of an owner to own, control and sell the perfect rendition of the work is changed. The rules of the game change, and we should consider what that means for the law.

I was interested in the Hargreaves recommendations on private use. I suppose that copyright and licensing have always respected the idea that the value of a work is based not on the time and effort taken to produce it, but in many cases on the value to the user. In the advertising industry, if music or a photograph or other image is used for a campaign that will run around the world, the cost will be much greater than for the insertion of a stand-alone image in one newspaper, or a radio advert on one local station. There is a recognition of the benefit to the user as well. That is important. If some relaxation of the rules on private usage, where there is very limited commercial value, if any, to the creator, would simplify people’s ability to use work for their own entertainment and for their and their family’s pleasure, I think that it would be reasonable and sensible to consider it. As the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics Media and Sport has said, we do not necessarily want a system in which someone can be sued for using a piece of Beatles music on a video of their cat on YouTube. That does not mean an open licence system without any attempt at regulation and control.

I am sure that many people would hope that a simplified version of rights clearance and the purchase of rights will mean that older materials—old pieces of film and programming—might be more readily available on services such as BBC iPlayer and elsewhere online. That might bring into play the rich archive of material that broadcasters such as the BBC own, which it is currently difficult to licence and use.

I agree almost entirely with the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bath about the digital exchange. The idea put forward by Hargreaves is interesting and compelling. There are already clearance houses for rights—PPL and PRS for music in particular—so I wonder what that new exchange would mean for them. I support the view that it would be wrong to compel people to register their works at the digital exchange with the back-door threat that otherwise they might not be covered by any of the legal protections in the Digital Economy Act 2010. Such compulsion would be cause for concern.

When I was a candidate for Parliament, like many other candidates at the time, and many hon. Members of the previous Parliament who were part of the debate on the 2010 Act, I met photographers who were concerned about the proposed legislation on orphan works. Not only should a way be found to pay a nominal licensing fee for orphan works such as images that people want to use, but if that use brings substantial financial gain—particularly if a found image is used in an advertising campaign, which brings great commercial benefit to the company using it—there should be a way to assess what the real value would have been if a proper licensing agreement had been in place. Clearer guidance is also needed on the commercial value of orphan works, in cases where the person in question comes forward after the image’s use.

The issues present a great overall challenge. Our responsibility is to protect the industry and the rights of the content creators, so that they know that they are in an industry where their endeavour and work receive a fair price and are fairly used, and they have incentives to carry on producing their work. One of the challenges that we face, in addition to an uncertain regulatory playing field, is the public’s attitude towards the illegal use of content, particularly in the music industry. Research demonstrates that, on the whole, the problem is not that people do not think they will be caught downloading material illegally, but that they do not think that there is anything wrong in it. The problem is that people do not necessarily understand the impact of piracy and the illegal use of works and the knock-on consequences for the creative industries. That is a communications and attitude-change challenge for the industry.

Part of the solution should be effective resolution using ideas in the Hargreaves report, a better framework for licensing works and understanding how those things work; but there is also a challenge for the industry to make the legitimate means of getting access to music and purchasing content so attractive, simple and easy to use that people would on the whole be deterred from using illegal sources, as the quality of the product and the method of delivering it would be so inferior and the potential consequences not worth the risk.

I welcome the report and hope that we shall not be back here in two years discussing yet another Government report on the issue, but that we shall instead be celebrating some progress on the matter.

The Internet and Privacy

Debate between Mike Weatherley and Damian Collins

Thursday 28th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mike Weatherley (Hove) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) for initiating this debate. I should like to draw hon. Members’ attention to my declaration of interest. At heart, I am a libertarian. As a general rule, I abhor state interference. I believe in free markets and feel that Government tend to hinder rather than enhance enterprise and creativity. However, I will argue today that some Government interference and regulation are essential. I am certainly against any information being stored about me without specific consent. That seems obvious and the Government should quickly address the matter through regulation.

My contribution to this debate is to do with intellectual property, piracy, the balancing of civil liberties with individual freedoms, and the protection of copyright holders. In September, I attended a week-long forum organised by the UN on worldwide internet governance. To some hon. Members, that may not seem like a lively and riveting subject, and, to be honest, parts of it were a little dry. None the less, there was some very interesting information to take away. The attendees were from a wide background. They were internet technical specialists, civil servants, pressure groups and so on. Disappointingly, there were few Government Ministers or Members of Parliament from around the world, other than some from east Africa and six from the UK Parliament. The pirate party from Sweden was also represented. That latter inclusion gives a flavour of what the debates tended to centre on.

Many groups were quite rightly concerned about child protection issues. Other than that, however, there was a general feeling that the internet should be totally free and that any regulation should be resisted, especially Government-type controls. However, it is my belief that that is a recipe for disaster. The internet is all-powerful, with an increasing flow of digital information, be it written, musical, on video or pictorial. It is providing for a world economy that is both fast-reacting and, for some, increasingly obscure. Anomalies are already showing up, as we have heard. At the forum, we learned that India does not have a data protection Act, so data stored there are not under the same rules and regulations as they are here.

However, the biggest threat to commerce and innovation is where creative works can become “owned” by users of the internet, rather than those who are creating the works. As we know, file sharing has become rife. At the forum, the prevailing view was that music downloads cannot be stopped, so we should let people get on with it. That is simply nonsense. Certainly, business models need to change so that musicians can recover revenues in different ways, such as on live tours. However, if all creative works are suddenly to be public property, our creative industries are at risk.

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

It is not simply that the internet, or search engines such as Google, are allowing free access to such work; as my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) mentioned, they are a making a profit from such access, and are making money from aggregating other people’s content.

[Mike Weatherley]

Indeed, and to add to my hon. Friend’s point, the money that is being made is not finding its way to the owners of the creative works. Let me give a quick example from Spain, where there is a free-for-all internet culture. Various leading movie studios are actively considering banning DVD sales in that country. Sales of DVDs fell six times faster in Spain than in the rest of Europe. There were 2.4 billion unauthorised downloads of music and movies, which represents 50 downloads per Spaniard, which is just huge. Unfortunately, the UK is going in the same direction.

There must be reward for inventors and artists to enable those sectors to flourish. We cannot allow the UK music industry to be decimated. I have submitted some parliamentary written questions to discover just how important our overseas earnings from music are to our economy, and to find out how many jobs are involved. I do not need the reply to know that the figure is very high indeed.

The Digital Economy Act 2010, which has been referred to, has started to recognise the problem, and the Gowers report made a firm commitment to protecting copyright owners. However, favourable reports will not save the situation if there is not some control of the internet by a responsible governing body that looks out for the interests of creative individuals. The Digital Economy Act has flaws, and the appeals process is one such flaw. However, what the Act does is enshrine the right of individuals not to have their works stolen. I therefore commend my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow for initiating this debate.