My Lords, given the mess that we were in on what constituted bundling and whether it was directed or undirected, I am sure that the Minister’s eyes alighted on this group, particularly the wonderful tables which he has provided for us and which we have read with interest, when he came to speak first on this. He cannot have been helped by the fact that his Chief Whip was hovering around his left shoulder as he was doing so, but he managed to cope with that and he is obviously learning fast on the job.
We have given notice of our intention to oppose the clause, because we were very concerned when reading it and seeing the wideness of the powers. The recommendations from the DPRR Committee have obviously stimulated the department to think again on that, and we are grateful for the amendments introduced by the Minister. But it tells the story that to get his narrative across he has to produce this 12 or 13-page document with tables that classify for us the conditions
under which an unpublished opera whose author died in 1920 has to reduce the term by 49 years, at which point the work enters the public domain. I did not know that, and I do not think that many people did know that. Clearly a great deal of education has to be done about this area. I am still slightly uncomfortable that the analytics that have gone into this—and I can think of examples from films, which I am concerned about more directly, or unpublished monographs of engravings when the author has died—leave us with something more complicated than it needs to be, perhaps.
Nevertheless, the context of that is not the issue. The question is whether the power should exist with government to make reductions in copyright in transitional cases. That has been subsequently reduced by the comments of the DPRR, and we are now satisfied with that.