Copyright cops stick close to entertainment industry

Although many of the Gowers Review's recommendations are starting to bear fruit, is the information sector reaping the benefits?

In the wake of last year’s Gowers Review of intellectual property (IP) law in the UK, some of the report’s recommendations are starting to bear fruit, but with the dominance of the entertainment industry in the area, the information sector risks being left out in the cold.

The Patent Office is to rebrand this month to the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO), and will harmonise the policing of IP infringement.

According to the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the name change will better reflect its wider responsibilities for the UK’s IP.

UK-IPO’s remit is to enforce IP based on the Gowers recommendations and his assertion that IP law should be a “recognition of IP crime as an area for police action as a component of organised crime”.

Gowers also recommended giving trading standards departments the power to police copyright infringement.

So when DTI minister Malcolm Wicks said that from 6 April this year, trading standards would receive £5m more in extra funding, and an extra 4,500 “pairs of eyes”, dubbed “copyright cops”, it wasn’t surprising the rhetoric was all about fighting back against counterfeiters and pirates who operate at car boot sales.

But while that generated headlines in the mainstream press, few benefits for the information sector can be seen from this government investment. And crucially there is still no clarification for users and providers on the terms of fair dealing.

A UK-IPO spokesperson told IWR: “The new powers will allow all trading standards officers to enforce S107A and S198A of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act. In total this comes to 4,500 staff currently in the service.”

So the legislation simply gives officers already in place the power to enforce the copyright laws. There will be no mass recruitment, as some parts of the media had inferred.

Bryan Lewin, lead officer for IP and head of trading standards at Northamptonshire Council, said that local authorities would be bidding for a part of the £5m pot to increase their IP policing abilities.

“It is a matter for each local authority,” Lewin said when asked whether trading standards would have specialist teams for policing corporate and academic IP. “TSI [Trading Standards Institute] as an organisation has no powers. There will not be a dedicated team investigating copyright infringements in the academic world as it is a matter for each local authority to deal with in its area.”

Lewin pointed out that “copyright owners still have civil rights to pursue matters of infringement while many continue to use trade organisations”.

So are resources exclusively for the benefit of the entertainment industry? Lewin agreed in part that “a great deal of publicity so far has only related to the entertainment industry”, but added: “The offence is much wider than pure counterfeiting and piracy issues. I suspect that trading standards will receive complaints about copies of original literary and artistic works and the like.”

In other words, the lion’s share of effort will go into fighting consumer copyright criminals, but an eye will be kept on those abusing fair dealing parameters.

Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, believes the main failing of the Gowers Review was not to clarify fair dealing. Economics author John Kay agrees and concluded in his report for the British Academy that copyright holders were using digital technologies to circumvent the UK’s fair dealing copyright exemptions. “If it is legitimate to copy material in terms of the Copyright Act, it should not be legitimate to use a digital rights management system to circumvent that exemption,” he said.

The UK-IPO would only confirm that it intended to release a consultation document in May to canvas options on exemption.