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Mr. Mole: I encourage the House to support amendments Nos. 9, 10 and 12 to 16, but I feel that it should resist new clause 4 and amendment No. 24.
In Committee, the now Minister of State, Department for Transport undertook to consider drafting an amendment defining a UK publisher. New clause 4, which was tabled by the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Moss), returns to that issue. An amendment was drafted, but its implications proved problematic. It was suggested that the e-commerce directive provided a possible model, but it was thought unworkable. The Committee was also advised that the concept of the place of establishment did not translate as helpfully into UK law and applied only to the provision of commercial services, whereas the Bill potentially covers non-commercial services as well. The amendment would also refer back to European law and regulations that are capable of being changed every five years. That is not satisfactory in respect of a definition in a Bill that is certainly expected to last longer than that.
For those reasons, we have decided to keep the original provision in clause 6(2)(g) that allows the definition to be dealt with by way of regulations after a great deal more consultation and consideration. Issues to do with the location of web material are irrelevant, including the concepts of domain extensions, whether they are .uk, .com or whatever, because the Bill treats the role of the individual in publications as critical. The key point is who is responsible for the publication and not where it physically sits.
Publishers have expressed their concern at the implications of new clause 4 for international publications in which UK businesses are partly engaged—for example, in sub-editing. They fear that such a form of words would prejudice their businesses.
Under amendment No. 9, copyright would not be infringed by web harvesting, provided it was done in accordance with prescribed conditions.
Amendments Nos. 10, 12 and 13 are consequential on amendment No. 9. The first two amendments are technical and clarify references to the Bill when enacted, and the third adds the term "deposit library" to "reader" and "relevant material", so that the terms have the same meaning as in clause 7 and throughout the Bill.
Amendment No. 14 would make equivalent provisions to amendment No. 9 in respect of database rights to ensure that they are not infringed by web harvesting.
Amendments Nos. 15 and 16 are technical amendments that are consequential on amendment No. 17 in relation to terminological references to the Act and definitions.
I ask the House to resist amendment No. 24, which is in the name of the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope), because it very much constitutes a subjective opinion. Such matters should be left to the collections policy of legal deposit libraries. Where collection policies interact with commercial interests, I would hope that a future technical committee could give advice.
Mr. Chope: How does somebody who has a novel on their own website know whether it should be submitted to the national collection, in accordance with the national collections policy?
Mr. Mole: Such an individual should look at the website of the British Library. The point of web harvesting is not to require activity by the publisher, but to simplify the process of deposit whereby libraries gather what they feel to be appropriate through their collections policy. The individual should look at the collections policy in trying to determine whether something should be collected.
The Bill tries to enable a continuation of the framework that existed for print materials. For example, bus timetables are not collected through legal deposit, and that would not translate into the electronic media. As for the question of what will limit the decisions on collection policy, the answer is available finance. We are talking not about a blank cheque but about cutting the cloth to the available resources in determining the scope of collection policies. Annual harvesting is a snapshot by automated electronic copying of what is deemed appropriate by collection policies.
Mr. Chope: Is the hon. Gentleman saying that the risk assessment described in the regulatory impact assessment has to be qualified by libraries' resources? The RIA says:
- "If the provisions of legal deposit are not extended to non-print publications there is a considerable risk that important material contributing to the national intellectual, cultural and scientific record will not be secured and preserved".
- "The collection of the British Library has been formed over many years and embraces all known languages. It traces its formal history to the foundation of the British Museum Library in 1753 in which three existing great collections were brought together: the Cotton Collection (which had been bequeathed to the nation in 1700) the Harley Collection and the Sloane Collection. To these was added in 1757 the Royal collection, formed by monarchs of earlier ages, and since then many others. The quality, size and depth of the Library's collection (estimated at above 150 million items) are central to its position as the national library.
While no library can any longer aspire to being comprehensive in its coverage of the world, the Library nevertheless collects widely and in depth in its areas of traditional strength.
The collection of the British Library operates on many levels and with reference to the rest of the Library system in the country. At the core it represents the collective memory of the nation by
- retaining for posterity the intellectual output of British publishing. To assist in this legal deposit legislation ensures that the Library is entitled to a copy of all books, journals and newspapers published in Britain. To this core is added purchase research-level material from around the world and appropriate unpublished material in different formats.
Our collecting policies reflect our function as a library of first instance and last resort; last resort for those whose primary access is the university, company or public library and first instance where the Library is the sole convenient source for the research material they require."
Mr. Forth: I may be the only person in the Chamber who does not wear an anorak on such occasions. However, the layman is entitled to speak and I shall therefore venture into the e-world or cyber world about which I have little or no knowledge and in which I am not interested. I hope that I can add a different dimension to the debate by asking the promoter and perhaps the Minister some non-technical and non-e-questions.
My unease was increased when my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) gave us a useful and relevant analysis of the sheer volume of material in the new world that we are considering. He referred to materials that were available only online and also used the term e-journals. That could alarm someone such as me who has never visited a website; I hope to get through my life without ever doing so. However, it could also reassure me that I am immunised from the amount of rubbish that doubtless exists. I confess that I am also bereft of the wisdom that might reside on all those websites. One has to make a judgment.
New clause 4 and amendment No. 24 especially attracted my interest. In the light of the comments of my hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch and for North-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Moss), who introduced new clause 4, I wonder how much meaning the provisions would have. Even with my scant knowledge of such matters, it strikes me that phrases such as "published on line", let alone
- "first published from the United Kingdom"
The technology is now such that people of any nationality can move freely throughout the world and communicate in a wireless mode on the internet and thence on websites. The term
- "first published from the United Kingdom"
In the old days, there were certainties. The printed word had certainty and one could readily identify its provenance. However, provenance is a problem in a wireless world when one tries to use such phrases as
- "first published from the United Kingdom"
- "a natural person resident in the United Kingdom".
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I hesitate even to discuss subsection (3) of the new clause, because I do not begin to understand it. I only hope that my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Cambridgeshire understands it and that someone else somewhere does as well, because I cannot imagine what would happen if it ever found its way into statute. It states:
- "The presence and use of the technical means and technologies required to provide the information society service, do not, in themselves, constitute an establishment of the provider."
My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and I normally agree on most things. We have worked together happily and in harmony for many years, and it distresses me to part company with him now. I gave him every opportunity to explain his amendment to me, and he tried to do so, but sadly he has not succeeded so far.
At least my hon. Friend's speech drew from the promoter the admission—I think it was an admission—that the collection policy on which he relied so heavily in responding to my hon. Friend will inevitably be constrained by the available resources. That is, in a sense, self-evident, but, having been teased out of the promoter, it sets in context the great difficulty that underpins the Bill.
If my hon. Friend's statistics are correct, there will be an explosion in the amount of material available electronically. For centuries the amount of material available at any one time has been limited by the sheer physical constraints of page and print, and the effort required to translate concepts on to the page and disseminate them—although more has been published in each decade of the past century than in the whole of human history before that.
Even I, in my state of blissful ignorance, can imagine the extent to which the electronic facilities currently available to us will multiply. As my hon. Friend explained, anyone with a keyboard and access to the internet and the necessary technology can now contribute in a way that was formerly restricted by the physical requirements of the printing process. We are entering a new universe, in which material will expand exponentially.
In that context, the collection policy constrained by resources that the promoter has mentioned becomes highly germane—to say nothing of the questions raised by my hon. Friend, and what he is trying to do in his amendment. A collection policy is one thing: it is established, and, although constrained by resources, it works. I think, however, that real difficulties arise when we attempt to build into that the ambitions contained in my hon. Friend's amendment. I think my hon. Friend would be the first to admit—indeed, I think he did admit—that the mind boggles when one tries to imagine who will exercise a subjective judgment, meaningful in terms of the amendment, about what is intellectual, what is cultural, or what is scientific.
Working backwards through those, the scientific is probably by far the easiest of those categories readily to identify, although the volume of scientific material is, if anything, even greater than the literary output confronting us. At least one could envisage a start being made on identifying what is, and what is not, scientific. When one moves on to the cultural or intellectual, however, the task is much more difficult. As my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch pointed out, the essays of a young mind might, in some cases, be regarded as of little value, but who is to say? Many of the great geniuses of history, in whatever sphere of endeavour, blossomed at an early age. Who would have set out to judge a musical, artistic, literary or scientific effort made at a very young age?
We are getting ourselves into new and very difficult territory, and although I fully appreciate what my hon. Friend was trying to do in tabling amendment No. 24 I am yet to be convinced that it is workable. I have to say to the promoter, however, that I am not convinced, either, that the collections policies on which he places so much reliance would be sufficiently robust to achieve what the Bill sets out to do.
I have come to the subject fairly new, and I thought, in my innocence, that this was a relatively limited, technical and focused Bill. I suspect that the promoter started out thinking that too, but I am sure that he would now admit that he has been surprised at the extent to which, when the House has examined it—this is the key point, and it is a tribute to the parliamentary process—on Second Reading, in Committee and now on Report, we have begun to see its ramifications.
I pay tribute to the promoter because he has, very properly, been prepared to table new clauses and amendments to try to put his Bill in order, and he is to be congratulated on that. I am left with the uneasy feeling that although the Bill's objectives are shared, I think, by everybody, it may be much more difficult to implement than was thought.
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