UK Government launches new consultation on copyright

When Andy Burnham indicated last week that he was willing to consider extending copyright term despite robust, independent evidence that it would cost consumers dear and benefit artists little, many in the Open Rights Group community were outraged. On top of the now 2 year delay to see vital exceptions and limitations to copyright law updated for the digital age, and with promises that consumers would have a compelling, legal alternative to illicit file-sharing by the end of this year looking emptier than ever, it felt like the consumer was in the process of being shut out of the intellectual property deal. And we couldn’t help wondering, who ministers had been talking to since Gowers.

So it was with heavy hearts yesterday morning that ORG representatives attended the launch of a new initiative to “develop a copyright agenda for the 21st century”. The initiative, which is accompanied by this fetching logo of some young people enjoying the collective realisation that copyright is indeed the future, presumably after spending all night at an illegal rave (or are they the only living humans left in Britain, awakening to a new dawn after a night spent slaughtering the zombie-pirates their copyright-flouting fellow humans had inexplicably become? you decide), forms part of a wider Government programme announced in October called “Digital Britain“. But does it signal the end of Gowers? In his preamble to the new mini-consultation, Minister for Intellectual Property David Lammy writes:

“We believe that there is scope to build on the Gowers Review and consider a wider range of issues in relation to copyright. It is vital that we have a system that supports creativity, investment and jobs and which inspires the confidence of businesses and users.”

At the launch, Lammy was insistent that the review was not intended to replace Gowers, and pointed to the fact that over 50% of his recommendations had been implemented. Unfortunately, it’s the ones that the ORG community have the biggest stake in – exceptions and limitations to allow format shifting and transformative use, ensuring that copyright should never be extended retrospectively – that have been left on the shelf. The consultation document states that the Intellectual Property Office will “continue to take this forward”. In the meantime, the document actually raises some interesting new questions which are worthy of detailed responses.

One question appears to ask whether artists are sufficiently protected from exploitation when negotiating with commercial rightsholders – an issue ORG has come up against, for example, in the discussions over whether copyright term extensions can ever put significantly more cash in artists’ pockets. Another addresses the issue of End User Licensing Agreements (EULAs) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) over-riding users’ rights under statutory exceptions, which is a matter of concern particularly to libraries and to those adapting content for the visually impaired. A third addresses the way copyright functions to protect old business models at times of technological change – a problem ORG has identified in our recent submission to the BERR consultation on illicit p2p.

Despite any cynicism that you may have detected in this post, then, we’ll be responding to this consultation. And we’d like you, the ORG community, to help us. We’ve uploaded the short consultation document to our interactive consultation tool – please drop by and leave your comments and we’ll use them to draft our final submission, which is due at the beginning of February 2009.