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Intellectual Property Rights

My Lords, there are great concerns in the creative industries about this area, but the key issue is not the intellectual property rights or the legal framework—although we want to take another look at that to make certain that it is all   right. The real concern lies with digital rights management and the business models that go with it. There is not a debate about who has the intellectual property rights, but there is a technical debate, as a result of the digital age, about how one controls the material. That is about business models and enforcement rather than the legal side. We need to debate that and make it clear. A question was raised about the support and increase in the term of protection for sound recordings. We have not made any decisions yet. We are looking at the issue, and we will be considering the impact on all stakeholders; that is, those who use sound recordings and consumers, as well as those who have rights in the recordings. I should point out that any change would require a change to the EC directive that harmonises all copyright terms across the EU. Therefore, no proposals are on the table at the moment to do this. So it would be a major change. A question was raised about the EC IP Enforcement Directive. UK law is largely consistent with the provisions in the EC IP Enforcement Directive, which was adopted last year. The main advantage of this directive is that it will bring the enforcement framework in some other member states up to the high levels that already exist in the UK. Later this year, we will be issuing a consultation paper on the changes that we think are necessary, so the directive will enter the statute book on time. Those were the major questions that were asked. There was a question about the Intellectual Property Advisory Committee. We are looking again at how we could restructure that. It has not achieved all that we hoped that it would achieve. The question is whether we should maintain a body outside the Patent Office, with a parallel policy-making process, or whether it should be firmly in the middle of the work of the Patent Office. We are now looking at that. The debate today has allowed a number of very important issues to be explored. We acknowledge the crucial role that the creative industries play in our economy—it is a major role these days. As I hope I have just shown very briefly, we have already made much progress on the IP issues that matter to this sector, but a lot more work is in the pipeline to permit the full potential of the digital revolution to be realised in this most important area of our economy.