My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, has put his finger on the real difficulty for designers. It is not that the period of copyright protection is too short; rather, it is too ineffective. What is needed for our designers is some method of ensuring that their designs are not ripped off extremely rapidly so that they have no effective period of protection. I have heard it said that new fashion designs that appear on the catwalks of London or Paris are copied within a very few weeks, and the copies are then retailed in our shops. If we wish to protect our designers, as we surely should because they are so talented, it seems to me that that is the direction in which we should look. Rather than extending
the period of copyright protection, it should be made an offence to sell something that was designed within a shorter but reasonable period of time, and such goods should be seizable if they appear in the retail markets here.