UK Digital Economy Bill Progress

at 3 December 2009

This UK parliament link displays an extremely helpful bill progress chart so that you can see what stage the Digital Economy Bill is at, and what is to happen next.

From this you can see that the next step is the House of Lords committee stage starting on 6 January 2010. The chart goes on to detail all the other stages through which the bill must pass if it is to become law.

Note that it should be possible for every photographer in the UK to make a submission to the bill committee as per the extract below from the Digital Economy Bill website link referred to above.

Get involved: guidance on written submissions

Do you have expertise or a special interest in matters contained within a Government Bill? Submit your views to the Commons Public Bill Committee.

I’m sure our UK photographic associations will make submissions to committee but please strengthen the case they submit by making your own submission.  Send a copy of your submission to your MP as well so that they have the information they need to defend our interests when the bill reaches the House of Commons.

It would be very helpful to all of us if the photographic associations gave their members a lead on identifying the specific concerns that should be addressed by the committee and our MP’s.

In the meantime here are some issues to consider, more will be added later -

1. The UK government has made no committment to introduce IP education to arts classes in primary and secondary education. The fact that the public have no understanding of copyright, its purpose and value is a failure by successive UK governments to address this issue. We now have a culture amongst the young that everything on the internet should be free, and who can blame for believing this?

2. The UK government has made no provision to address the issue of metadata stripping creating untold numbers of orphan images, yet it is considering an orphans works act. The law should make the stripping of copyright metadata an infringement offence with no if's and buts.

3. The UK goverment has not addressed the issues of moral rights. In the House of Lords debate one speaker said that moral rights should be unwaivable, enforceable, and that the law should be changed to ensure that copyright metadata is not stripped out of images.

There are other issues that should be added to this list, write to us using our contact form and tell us what you think. We will keep this information up to date with issues that need to be addressed by the digital economy bill and you can use this information as a basis for your submission to the House of Lords committee and to submit a copy to your MP.If you don't know who your MP is use this link.

The following links give further current information.

• The full transcript of the debate in the House of Lords on 2nd December 2009
• Video of the House of Lords debate
  
• House of Lords Blog on the Bill - Lords of the Blog written by Lord Norton
• Comment on the Bill following the Lords debate by British Journal of Photography, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Updiggers Blogspot, Guardian
• The full content of the The Digital Economy Bill 
• Fact sheets concerning this bill.