---

Creative Industries

Well, it is a kind of ant. Now there is a confession for you. Publishers and others should encourage young people to discover new ants, or whatever it is that might some day be useful in an experiment. Of course, at the other end, there is the drug industry with its patents, intellectual property rights and so on. The system seems to work. It generates a field where one can act to prevent other people from using the product of one's own endeavours. I think that the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, created by the Prime Minister, will tackle a lot of the problems that I am talking about. Patents are important. We judge the success of industries, universities and higher education centres by the number of patents they hold. It is a crude measure of success. I do not see why copyrights could not also be a crude measure of success in certain industries. It ought to be done much more avidly than it is. We need to think not just about music when considering the problems of downloading. We need to think about the kinds of problem addressed by the new all-party writers' group that we have set up. People's writing is being exploited. An article that appeared in the Evening Standard appears in the Hong Kong Times under the same name, but nobody has been asked for permission to print it, and they certainly do not get paid for it. One might ask why they should be, to which the answer is: they should be paid for it because writing is their only source of income. I spoke the other day to Maureen Freely, the famous president of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society in this country. She is eminent and well known. When she writes a book, she gets £1,000 laid on the table, just like that. We talk about the minimum wage, but such a book takes her three years to produce, and she gets £1,000 from the publishers. That is not a problem for J.K. Rowling, Peter Mandelson, ex-Prime Ministers and such people, who get big money, but it is a problem for the majority of writers in this country whose products people enjoy. We are moving into an age in which books, too, can be downloaded on to digital devices. I am not sure how many books can stored, but I think that somebody told me it was 30,000. There is nothing like curling up with a book. I am sure that the Minister enjoys it as much as the rest of us, but there is now the opportunity to read them on a digital screen. It may not be as cuddly, but it is certainly there, and it exploits a lot of the work that writers do. That is a problem. We will hear more about the music industry. The all-party writers' group is supported by the ALCS, many of whose surveys have turned up interesting facts about public attitudes to copyright. Most people surveyed believe that artists should be recompensed for their work rather than having it purloined. They believe that a reasonable sum should be given them, because that is their sole income. As I have pointed out, many are not as successful as Ian Rankin, J.K. Rowling and so on. There is always a spread. Downloading can happen with the written word as well, and I think that it will increase.