Digital Britain

My Lords, I detect a level of disagreement. I share the noble Earl’s view that there is a balance to be struck between copyright protection and innovation. I do not share the view that strong copyright automatically stifles innovation. I am conscious of the earlier criticism made by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, that we have not given noble Lords much time to read the report, but it talks about greater access to orphan works and what progress we seek to make on format shifting. There are areas where we can make progress. The noble Earl’s point about royalty allocation is important but it is not relevant to this question. The body that he refers to is not a government body. Let us be clear: we are saying that we believe that there is a role for an industry body, which would be responsible for setting a code under licence from the statutory regulator. That is no different from what happens in, for example, the advertising industry, where the Advertising Standards Authority, which is not a government body but an industry body, provides a code, a framework and a set of rules around which commercial advertisers, media owners and inventory providers operate in a way that protects us as consumers of advertising content. We are not talking about another government agency. That is another piece of nonsense that has been spread around as a means of trying to pollute the policy debate. However, the central question that the noble Earl asks is very legitimate: do we have the balance right? We believe that we have, but I entirely accept that there are alternative opinions.