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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, unless the Committee objects, I will telescope proceedings by speaking also to all my remaining amendments. I hear no objections: this is good. The amendments have three things in common. First, I will not move them this evening because they are all probing amendments. Secondly, I cannot imagine that under any circumstances they will end up in the Bill in their current form. Thirdly, if I do not get a reasonable answer from the Minister this evening or by letter before Report, they will certainly re-emerge then, and will probably contain a requirement that Ofcom continues to investigate, or that in some other way progress continues to be made. Amendment 285 concerns format shifting, which is an old chestnut. It is something that is widely done. It is pretty universally accepted that if you buy a CD, you can put it on your MP3 player; but it is none the less against copyright. If copyright owners tried to pursue this hard, the Government and public would react swiftly against them. None the less, there is a right there that remains unremunerated. Copyright owners have been pressing for this to be dealt with, as it is on the continent, by a levy on the kit used for format shifting. Another way of dealing with it might be that one could acquire a licence to format shift from the relevant licensing authority in whatever form the Government choose, so that rather than burdening ourselves with creating a new system of getting revenue via hardware, we use the existing system of licensing bodies to allow people to acquire a licence to format shift, much in the same way as people acquire a television licence. Format shifting is an unsettled area of copyright in which we should be making gentle progress. Amendments 286 and 287 concern the artist’s right to remarket. Only a minority of music and other material is available on the net. Many artists find that substantial parts of their back catalogues are not for sale: they are locked up by people who have acquired the copyright interests and who do not find it worth their while marketing the work, so the artist gets no revenue from it. I think that there is a scheme—the noble Lord will tell me if I am wrong—that covers programmes provided by independent producers to ITV. After a certain period, if the programmes are no longer being actively used by ITV, they become open for remarketing by the companies that made them. If they successfully remarket something, they pay, I think, 50 per cent back to ITV. ITV acquires a revenue stream for which it has to make no effort at all. The original producer—who after all ought to be the concern of this Bill as much as the copyright owner—acquires a revenue stream where before there was no hope of income. Both sides benefit. This arrangement has been reached in this one small corner of the industry, although it could certainly be extended to music without any damage to anyone. The industry ought to be encouraged to make progress on this and, if we come to a proper reform of copyright, ought to be included. I want to hear from the Government what their position is on this and what progress they hope to be making in that direction. I shall not address Amendment 289. I shall not move it at the appropriate time. Amendment 290 relates to a practice which has grown up among some of the major rights holders. They look at licensing the material they have control of to a scheme and say, as some internet schemes do, ““All you can eat for $15 a month””, or whatever the right wording for that is in relation to music. Rather than requiring a payment from the scheme they are licensing, they say, ““You can have access to our music for a proportion of your equity””. They then say to the creators of this content, ““No, you’re not entitled to any of this. This is not income, this is something else. It is ours, not yours””. This Bill should be concerned as much with the creators as with the owners of copyright. This injustice is likely to grow in the context of the way in which one can envisage the business of distribution of copyright materials on the net developing, and it ought to be ended because the interests of the creator ought to be preserved even if the rights have been disposed of in return for equity. Amendment 291 is an attempt to move the industry, and particularly the music industry, on a bit. It probably goes a bit far to discuss this evening. Amendment 292 returns us to something we have discussed peripherally this evening; namely, the way in which search engines and copyrights interact. That is amplified in Amendment 292BA, which looks at links. To deal with the latter amendment first, some major groups have asserted that to link to their material on the internet is to infringe their copyright. This is an extremely undesirable development and we ought to state clearly that we are against it and will take action against it. I return to my earlier comments on copyright—copyright is a compact between a Government and the creators of copyright content to enable the creation of that content by disadvantaging its citizens. I do not see that copyrighting or allowing the copyrighting of links advantages citizens in any way. There is no creation involved in that act. It merely starts to balkanise and destabilise the web and it should not be allowed. We should think carefully about what we want search engines to do and what we want the web to look like. It comes down to the question of whether we want to run the web British style or Chinese style. Are we interested in search engines being able to reach anything that people have put out on the web and that are not specifically blocked, or do we want to allow something that is more balkanised and where whole sections of the web are available only through subscription to a certain ISP or site? We ought to take the clear view that the breadth of knowledge on the web should be available to all, and that commercial interests on the web should be confined to relatively small corners of it and not allowed to take over vast swathes of it. In most cases, a search engine taking a small extract of copyright material—what is on a search engine is copyright material—should be regarded as fair usage and a proper part of the way in which the citizen and the copyright holder interact. I beg to move.