UK Parliament / Open data

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

My Lords, it would be a shame not to savour the final quarter-hour of Committee today—although I have probably learnt more about agriculture than I ever wished to. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is still here; he is clearly incredibly versatile in all these matters. Seeing him and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, I am afraid that I am reminded of the passage of the Digital Economy Bill, which may or may not be a good thing. As we know from that, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is never knowingly underprovocative, particularly on the question of intellectual property rights, and I am not going to enter the lists with him on the issue of the format-shifting exception that was the subject of the Christmas present he mentioned.

Amendment 28A is an incredibly sweeping amendment that would have a massive impact on the cloud computing industry in the UK, which is forecast to grow from something like £2 billion to £6 billion. It would have an incredibly damaging effect, which makes it highly undesirable for various commercial reasons. Quite frankly,

it also happens to be in contravention of the existing EU directive on computer software, which gives the exclusive rights to copyright owners in those circumstances. Of course, there are issues about the ownership of digital content, but this is not the way to deal with them. There are issues about who owns what you have on your iPad or tablet from other manufacturers, but this is an incredibly sweeping way to do it. In the way the amendment is phrased, I doubt whether it will cure the issue by itself.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
742 cc303-4GC 
Session
2012-13
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
Subjects
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