My Lords, briefly, this is a shameless attempt to publicise a success story from the Copyright Licensing Steering Group, the people who are bringing us the Copyright Hub. I take your Lordships back to the passage of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, when a number of us argued for progress on metadata protection to be included in the Secretary of State’s annual report. On 6 March of this year the Minister said,
“The Government are keenly aware of and sensitive to the concerns of creators in relation to metadata. They believe that an industry-led approach is most likely to identify the key issues and the most effective solutions. … The Intellectual Property Office will also be working with the Technology Strategy Board to consider other options to tackle the issues around the misuse of digital images as well as search and stripping of metadata. I hope that in the light of what I have said in my brief comments my noble friend can withdraw his amendment”.—[Official Report, 6/3/13; col. 1602.]
It is very gratifying to be able to report that a sub-group of the Copyright Licensing Steering Group has produced, with a very comprehensive range of people within the industry, a draft code of practice that aims to ensure that relevant licensing metadata is identified in a consistent manner and remains readily available for licensing purposes. It calls on creators of images—photographers, and so on—to make it easier
for potential users to find them by ensuring that they include key information such as their name, the date of creation of the image and a contact address. For users of images, the code of practice recommends that they take all reasonable steps to check that licensing metadata is attached to an image before they use it.
I understand that the draft code of practice is currently out to consultation and the Copyright Licensing Steering Group is seeking views on whether it is pitched at the right level and whether having general principles rather than more detailed principles is the right way forward. The Copyright Hub itself is now using Getty Images technology to search and identify images. It looks as though the Copyright Hub will fulfil the hopes placed in it, together with this whole development of protection of metadata.
The irony is that metadata stripping is unlawful under Section 296ZG of the CDPA 1988. The problem until now has been the issue of policing and enforcement. It looks as though photographers will be able, through a combination of the code of practice and the fact that the Copyright Hub is coming into existence, to remedy the unlawful stripping of metadata. It is good to know that other aspects of the Copyright Hub are being developed; some of them involve metadata, others do not. In the case of music, that is in conjunction with the new Global Repertoire Database.
It is useful to reflect briefly that this has been an interesting year in terms of debating and discussing intellectual property so fundamentally, and that there is some good news out there. I beg to move.