I thank the noble Lord for that question. I think that we will need to wait and see what the evaluation looks like—I urge him to make some input on the nature of evaluation. It is a bit of a hypothetical question. As a representative of the Government, I would be uneasy about making any promises, but I thank the noble Lord for the point made.
I should move on, as time is pressing, to say a little about fair dealing, which the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, raised. Fair dealing is an established legal concept that has been part of copyright law for more than 100 years. It is a question of fact, degree and impression and will take into account a number of factors, the main ones being whether the alleged fair dealing is in commercial competition with the owner’s exploitation of the work; whether the work has already been published or otherwise exposed to the public; and the amount of work which has been undertaken and the importance of it. We did not intend to define it further in the legislation, because doing so would upset this well established case law and undermine its main benefit, its ability to adapt to the circumstances of any specific case.
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, asked what evidence the Government had relied on in developing their policy proposals. The Government have worked hard to ensure that the proposed changes are based on evidence. The impact assessments are based on the best evidence available and were reviewed and validated by the independent Regulatory Policy Committee.
The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, referred to cloud services. This is a difficult and very important area which was explored as part of the Government’s impact assessment. However, we were not provided with sufficient data to enable us to determine what the impact would be. The majority of evidence received related to licence services, which would not fall within the scope of the exception; for example, because they provided streamed content so were not relevant. The music industry has
accepted unlawful private copying for many years, so one might reasonably assume that the ability of the consumer to make copies of CDs is already taken into account when licensing deals are negotiated. Negotiation of contracts between businesses is a matter for those businesses. If, however, this is an issue of market abuse, it would obviously be a matter for the competition authorities.
The Government have published the changes through social media and website updates and through contacting interested stakeholders, such as those who responded to the technical review. They have published plain English guidance aimed at different user groups as well as an unofficial consolidated version of the copyright Act. We would expect wider education initiatives, such as the recently announced education campaign, to include educational messages—