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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, it is with enormous pleasure that I rise at 10 minutes before 11 pm to move this final probing amendment in Committee. The Public Lending Right Act 1979 gives authors the legal right to receive payment for the free loan of their books by public libraries. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 provides that any eligible works currently lent under the PLR scheme are lent without infringing copyright under the 1988 Act. Clause 44 of this Bill proposes to extend the 1979 Act to cover non-print book formats, meaning that e-books would now be included under the public lending right. Publishers strongly support the remuneration that PLR provides for authors and would like authors to continue to collect PLR money based on the model of one payment for one loan to one reader. If the proposal were enacted, rights holders’ ability to licence the lending rights for these works to libraries would effectively be removed. E-book formats, unlike their physical counterparts, are highly conducive to unauthorised copying and onward exploitation. It is important, therefore, that there are sufficient safeguards in the primary legislation. One of these safeguards should be that the extension of PLR to digital formats is restricted to one loan to one reader of each copy of the work held by the library, as would be the case for a physical book. This probing amendment is designed to clarify the Government’s intention in this regard. I believe that the Government have already expressed their commitment to this policy although it is not included in the Bill. While hard copy audiobooks or pre-loaded e-books can be lent in a meaningful sense of the word, libraries do not have the controls in place to protect loans of digital book files or enforce temporary access to books in digital formats which are downloaded for a short time but not retained. Without the inclusion of this proviso, multiple copies of an e-book could be made available for loan simultaneously when only one copy had been purchased. This would effectively result in free loans or free online access to authors’ and publishers’ content in an e-format and could result in heavy financial losses for creators, making investment in the burgeoning digital market unsustainable. I beg to move.