UK Culture Select Committee condemns government IP policy as damaging to copyright holders

[Alan Gallery]

I wonder just what forum members think of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee report criticising the Hargreaves report, the IPO and the government's copyright weakening agenda.

 

Quote:

 

"Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has harshly criticised the government and Google in a report into the UK's creative industries.

The MPs want the 2010 Digital Economy Act - which cracks down on downloaders of pirated material and other copyright infringers - activated without further delay. And the panel wants recommendations from Professor Ian Hargreaves' radical review of UK intellectual property – the so-called "Google Review" – scrapped.

 

 

This comes after the backbenchers concluded the government is largely barking up the wrong tree with its policy on protecting intellectual property in Blighty (or not as the case seems to be). As El Reg has explained in exhaustive length,....rather than building markets based on property rights, it has instead set about dismantling the very rights that people in those markets need to earn a crust.

 

"We regret that the Hargreaves report adopts a significantly low standard in relation to the need for objective evidence in determining copyright policy," the MPs write in their report. "We do not consider Professor Hargreaves has adequately assessed the dangers of putting the established system of copyright at risk for no obvious benefit."

 

End quote.

 

The whole lot here:

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/26/dcms_committee_creative_industries/

 

 

My view it that the report at last shows that some MPs are wakeing up the the damage that the Hargreaves report and the stance the government has taken as a result, (as if the Hargreaves report was not what the government wanted to hear) would do to the economic viability of the whole creative sector.

[DavidC]

Sadly a lot of protection that already exists in law is totally ignored -

 

Data stripping which creates the orphans in our industry by the removal of metadata on a commercial scale can already constitute a criminal offense as well as a civil infringement but as we know it is common practice amongst UK newspapers and broadcast media. All organisations that regularly use and resize pictures, such as broadcasters and newspapers should at least agree a voluntary code of practice in which they publicly commit to: (1) end the practice of stripping metadata from images and (2) refuse to use images for which there is no metadata attached.

 

Older readers of the old forum will remember me banging on about this, contacting Managing Eds, my MP, Lord Younger etc., etc.... it achieved little support here - possibly because it needed a bit of effort and was a bit harder to understand than postings on 'first sales' - however it was, and is, a damned sight more important - when your picture which you lovingly fill with plenty of IPTC data has been stripped of that information it becomes the Google loved 'Orphan' - under the new legislation it may be used by anyone who has conducted an (as yet undefined) 'Diligent Search' and applied to have the image declared 'orphan'. 

 

So you can forget about the celebrations if that might have been your 'first sale'............

 

Hopefully the Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee's words will be more effective than mine (!!!!) - but there is a rush to complete the new legislation before the arrival of an EU ban scheduled for October 2014 which might have helped us a bit.......

 

Bored already ?  That's the way that our rights are gradually stripped away - like Metadata - by weasel worded legislation to help deeply vested interests - like internet service providers.....

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Added a bit later when blood pressure was a little lower......

 

See also the topic:

UK Gov - IPO take on "myths" regarding rights grab  where a number of our contributors who should know better made light of the problem - fortunately even the  special select committee was able to see the shortcomings....