Changes to
Intellectual Property systems could add up to £7.9 billion to the
UK’s economy, the first report looking at how it can drive growth
said today.
The publication of Digital Opportunity follows a
six-month independent review of IP and Growth, led by Professor
Ian Hargreaves. He was asked to consider how the national and
international IP system can best work to promote innovation and
growth.
His recommendations aim to give the UK a competitive advantage –
and put it on a par with international competitors. Taken
together, they have the potential to add up to 0.6 per cent to
annual GDP and to cut the costs of doing business with IP-related
business by £750m within a decade.
The key recommendations are:
the UK should have a “Digital Copyright Exchange”: a digital
market place where licences in copyright content can be readily
bought and sold, a sort of online copyright shop.
the Government should legislate to permit access to orphan
works, where the owner cannot be traced. For example some
copyrighted works remain locked away because their authors either
aren’t known or can’t be traced to give permission for use. In the
worst cases, where one owner cannot be located - just one out of
hundreds contained in a film or TV programme - they can
effectively hold the interests of others to ransom as it becomes a
criminal offence to exploit that work commercially.
updating what it is lawful to copy. This includes copying for
private purposes (such as shifting music from a laptop to an mp3
player) and copying which does not conflict with the core aims of
copyright – for example, digital copying of medical and other
journals for computerised analysis in research. For example an
academic working on malaria cannot draw on previous research
through data mining because they cannot get permission to copy the
datasets they need to mine.
the Government’s IP policy decisions need to be more closely
based on economic evidence and should pay more attention to the
impact on non-rights holders and consumers;
changes to the Intellectual Property Office’s (IPO) powers to
enable it to help the IP framework adapt to future economic and
technological change
Professor Hargreaves said:
"In recent years, the UK has failed to make the changes
needed to modernise copyright law, for which we will pay an
increasing economic price as we make our way into the third decade
of the commercial internet. My recommendations set out how the IP
framework can promote innovation and economic growth in the UK
economy.
“The recommendations of the review are designed to enhance the
economic potential of the UK's creative industries and to
ensure that the emergence of high technology businesses,
especially smaller businesses, in other sectors is not impeded by
our IP laws.”
Business Secretary Vince Cable said:
“The Government is wholly focused on boosting growth – and we
can’t afford to shy away from looking at complicated or
controversial areas. That’s why I welcome this report and its
clear link between intellectual property and potential economic growth.
“The report highlights real scope for changes to copyright laws
which could add enormous value to the UK economy.
“Intellectual Property has an enormous impact on individuals,
businesses and industries across the UK. It affects what we can
and can't do in business, education and in our daily
lives. Technological innovation, successful creative businesses
and strong international brands need to thrive.”
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne said:
"It is vital that our Intellectual Property laws
incentivise innovation and investment, helping to drive the
private sector-led economic recovery.
“I warmly welcome Professor Hargreaves’ review on how the
Intellectual Property framework can be updated to better support
economic growth in the digital age."
Minister for Intellectual Property Baroness Wilcox added:
“The Review presents opportunities to support dynamic UK
businesses which will deliver innovation, growth and jobs in the
years to come. It offers us the chance of a future with a
developing market for Britain's creative talent, where
the value of innovation and research outweighs the fear of piracy
and counterfeiting.
“This report is the culmination of six months of work by
Professor Hargreaves and his panel of experts. We thank him and
his colleagues for their hard work and we will be giving the
review’s recommendations serious consideration and providing a
full response soon.”
The recommendations in the report cut across a number of
different policy areas and will be of interest to all Government
Departments. The recommendations on copyright will be of
particular interest to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport
and the Department of Education.
Hargreaves Review Recommendations
1. Evidence. Government should ensure that
development of the IP System is driven as far as possible by
objective evidence. Policy should balance measurable economic
objectives against social goals and potential benefits for rights
holders against impacts on consumers and other interests. These
concerns will be of particular importance in assessing future
claims to extend rights or in determining desirable limits to
rights.
2. International priorities. The UK should
resolutely pursue its international interests in IP, particularly
with respect to emerging economies such as China and Review of
Intellectual Property and Growth India, based upon positions
grounded in economic evidence. It should attach the highest
immediate priority to achieving a unified EU patent court and EU
patent system, which promises significant economic benefits to UK
business. The UK should work to make the Patent Cooperation Treaty
a more effective vehicle for international processing of patent
applications.
3. Copyright licensing. In order to boost UK
firms’ access to transparent, contestable and global digital
markets, the UK should establish a cross sectoral Digital
Copyright Exchange. Government should appoint a senior figure to
oversee its design and implementation by the end of 2012. A range
of incentives and disincentives will be needed to encourage rights
holders and others to take part. Governance should reflect the
interests of participants, working to an agreed code of practice.
The UK should support moves by the European Commission to
establish a framework for cross border copyright licensing, with
clear benefits to the UK as a major exporter of copyright works.
Collecting societies should be required by law to adopt codes of
practice, approved by the IPO and the UK competition authorities,
to ensure that they operate in a way that is consistent with the
further development of efficient, open markets.
4. Orphan works. The Government should
legislate to enable licensing of orphan works. This should
establish extended collective licensing for mass licensing of
orphan works, and a clearance procedure for use of individual
works. In both cases, a work should only be treated as an orphan
if it cannot be found by search of the databases involved in the
proposed Digital Copyright Exchange.
5. Limits to copyright. Government should
firmly resist over-regulation of activities which do not prejudice
the central objective of copyright, namely the provision of
incentives to creators. Government should deliver copyright
exceptions at national level to realise all the opportunities
within the EU framework, including format shifting, parody,
non-commercial research, and library archiving. The UK should also
promote at EU level an exception to support text and data
analytics. The UK should give a lead at EU level to develop a
further copyright exception designed to build into the EU
framework adaptability to new technologies. This would be designed
to allow uses enabled by technology of works in ways which do not
directly trade on the underlying creative and expressive purpose
of the work. The Government should also legislate to ensure that
these and other copyright exceptions are protected from override
by contract.
6. Patent thickets and other obstructions to
innovation. In order to limit the effects of these barriers
to innovation, the Government should: take a leading role in
promoting international efforts to cut backlogs and manage the
boom in patent applications by further extending “work sharing”
with patent offices in other countries;
work to ensure patents are not extended into sectors, such as
non-technical computer programs and business methods, which they
do not currently cover, without clear evidence of benefit;
investigate ways of limiting adverse consequences of patent
thickets, including by working with international partners to
establish a patent fee Review of Intellectual Property and Growth
structure set by reference to innovation and growth goals rather
than solely by reference to patent office running costs. The
structure of patent renewal fees might be adjusted to encourage
patentees to assess more carefully the value of maintaining lower
value patents, so reducing the density of “patent thickets”.
7. The design industry. The role of IP in
supporting this important branch of the creative economy has been
neglected. In the next 12 months, the IPO should conduct an
evidence based assessment of the relationship between design
rights and innovation, with a view to establishing a firmer basis
for evaluating policy at the UK and European level. The assessment
should include exploration with design interests of whether access
to the proposed Digital Copyright Exchange would help creators
protect and market their designs and help users better achieve
legally compliant access to designs.
8. Enforcement of IP rights. The Government
should pursue an integrated approach based upon enforcement,
education and, crucially, measures to strengthen and grow
legitimate markets in copyright and other IP protected fields.
When the enforcement regime set out in the DEA becomes operational
next year its impact should be carefully monitored and compared
with experience in other countries, in order to provide the
insight needed to adjust enforcement mechanisms as market
conditions evolve. This is urgent and Ofcom should not wait until
then to establish its benchmarks and begin building data on
trends. In order to support copyright holders in enforcing their
rights the Government should introduce a small claims track for
low monetary value IP claims in the Patents County Court.
9. Small firm access to IP advice. The IPO
should draw up plans to improve accessibility of the IP system to
smaller companies who will benefit from it. This should involve
access to lower cost providers of integrated IP legal and
commercial advice.
10. An IP system responsive to change. The
IPO should be given the necessary powers and mandate in law to
ensure that it focuses on its central task of ensuring that the
UK’s IP system promotes innovation and growth through efficient,
contestable markets. It should be empowered to issue statutory
opinions where these will help clarify copyright law. As an
element of improved transparency and adaptability, Government
should ensure that by the end of 2013, the IPO publishes an
assessment of the impact of those measures advocated in this
review which have been accepted by Government.
Notes to editors:
1. A full copy of the report can be found at www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview
2. Prime Minister David Cameron unveiled the six-month review
during a speech at a major event in Shoreditch in November 2010.
3. Professor Ian Hargreaves holds the chair of Digital Economy at
the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies and
Cardiff Business School. As a distinguished academic, journalist
and public servant, he has held senior positions at the BBC,
Financial Times, The Independent, and New Statesman. He was a
founding non-executive board member of the Office of
Communications (Ofcom) and an executive board member, and Director
of Strategic Communications at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
4. The expert panel consisted of Tom Loosemore, Roger Burt,
Professor David Gann, Professor James Boyle and Professor Mark Schankerman.
5. It will also form part of the Government’s wider Growth Review
which is examining how we can remove the barriers to achieve
strong, sustainable and balanced growth that is more evenly shared
across the country and between industries.
6. It examined the available evidence as to how far the IP
framework currently promotes these objectives, drawing on US and
European as well as UK experience, and focused in particular on:
Identification of barriers to growth in the IP system, and how
to overcome them;How the IP framework could better enable new
business models appropriate to the digital age.
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