Written evidence submitted by Peter and Georgina Bowater

SUMMARY

• Paragraphs 1 – 4, our situation and how it may be affected.

• The challenge and risks of being an independent artist and creator. The importance to society of independent creative people and businesses and the impossibility of attaining and maintaining high creative and ethical standards without an independent body of artists supported by IP legislation.

• The probable consequences of the implementation of the Hargreaves Report.

• The importance and difficulty of maintaining high artistic and ethical standards in the digital age.

• The lack of legal basis under international and human rights law for the Hargreaves proposal and the probable consequences.

• International reference comparing the Hargreaves proposals to dangerous events in China.

• Our recommendations to the Committee.

1. We are both self-taught professional photographers. We have been in business for about 40 years mostly working in publicity and advertising for UK companies and UK interests. We spent about 20 years working world-wide photographing industrial and agricultural developments and projects, largely for UK corporate clients. We financed long overseas assignments for groups of companies, preferring to be paid by results, and to reserve our rights to the resulting images and to have the time between assignments to build up a large library which we imagined would provide us with a safe and substantial pension.

2. For some years we worked from a studio in Edinburgh producing very high quality work for international advertising and publicity.

3. As our work has involved total dedication from both of us, seven days a week, many hours a day, for nearly 40 years, we have tried at the ages now of 67 and 66 to slow down and enjoy something approaching retirement. Alas, due to the declining prices paid for licensing of the images from our library, and due to the blatant theft and monopolistic pressures that dominate our market, we are still having to work very long hours to survive.

4. Although we now live in France (we continue to be British citizens) nearly all of our business interests have been and still are in the UK. If the proposed Hargreaves Report recommendations, or if the greater part of them become law in the UK, this will amount to the wholesale theft of our intellectual property and we will be left with only the equity from our house and our remaining pensions of about £580 per month.

5. Independent photographers, writers and other artists do not choose an easy calling. Risks, particularly financial, are extreme and, in the digital age for photographers, costs are accelerating well beyond the ability of most of us to pay. Britain has long prided itself in its originality and enterprise of its citizens and has taken the lead in many artistic pursuits. Without the creator’s natural right to the proceeds from his/her work, the only artistic enterprise that can continue to prosper will be as a salaried employee of a large corporation, or the recipients of government subventions. One can not imagine that such an artistic community could continue to retain the UK’s place in the artistic and creative world. It is hard to separate the proposal by government to effectively remove the creator’s absolute right to his intellectual property from the scheming of the unscrupulous and dishonest to remove other rights and properties from other groups of citizens. Indeed, what is the difference between the government that refuses to impose sanctions on organisations and individuals who remove our copyright data from our files and then allows these same people to go ahead and use the material for what they will without either payment or reference to the creator, and the individual or corporation who removes the number plates from cars and takes them away because the owner has not properly identified them?

6. Recent sad events in British cities begin to explain themselves given a government that proposes to condone and facilitate the removal and use of our intellectual property to the benefit of large businesses that will result in our impoverishment. Is it not hypocrital to choose to punish rioters and looters with firmness on the basis of teaching a sharp lesson to those without social and moral standards while, at the same time, shrugging off the results of the government’s own legislation intended not only to take away our moral and physical rights in our property but to assist in this confiscation by refusing to legislate against the removal of our copyright information? The behaviour that is being condoned, in fact encouraged, by the Hargreaves Report is normally considered to be criminal activity and the results will not be a sudden flowering of large media corporations who will briefly benefit from free content but the death of creativity and the disappearance of serious artists, photographers and writers, the disappearance of serious news reporting, critical independent journalism and other creative originality. How can it be otherwise?

7. There are widespread beliefs that photography in the digital age is just a case of possessing the right equipment. But we all have voices. How many of us can sing? I could buy a Stradivarius if I had the money. Would that make me a great violinist? We have worked for 40 years to build up our skills, our judgment, our techniques and our business acumen. We have stayed in business because we have always satisfied our clients and have built up an aesthetic judgment that is not acquired overnight, if ever. Yes, of course, there are competent and sometimes brilliant amateurs but they are very much in the minority and can not have the commitment needed to provide the market with what it wants. Standards are falling all the time because professionals can no longer exist due to corporate, and now government, abuses. Also, governments, particularly in the UK, seem unaware that the amateur competitor, for what he is worth, sells his work but does not pay taxes and social security on that income, as the professional does. The size of the black economy is far larger than the government dares to estimate.

8. Art and creativity are high in the list of the most important aspects of any culture. As the recent riots in the UK have shown, culture is under stress. To destroy or at least decimate artistic and creative minds is not going to militate towards solving any state’s social ills. We see corruption in high places go unpunished. Should we trust government to strike a balance between the haves and have-nots, not in terms of equality but in terms of justice? If the British Government goes ahead with the proposed legislation it will be flying in the face of the Berne Convention, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the EU’s standpoint on Human Rights and, of course, the Intellectual Property Laws of all other advanced countries. The putative users of this windfall of free material will not know or care about the origin of the material that they are using, a large proportion of which will undoubtedly be protected by the laws of other states, particularly the USA. Look forward to a bonanza for American Class Action lawyers and threats to property overseas owned by British companies who choose to implement the advantages of legislation that allows them to ignore the rights of the creator.

9. We have both frequently worked in China where social pressures are contained only by a brutal and inhumane regime. One of the most shocking recent tendencies there has been the expropriation of the land of small farmers for industrial and domestic development. The effects are currently shrugged off particularly as the rewards of these, mostly corrupt, deals continue to enrich and empower the authorities concerned. The inhumanity is evident and there is already widespread disorder as a result of this practice. We are struggling to understand the difference between what the British Government is proposing and what Chinese authorities are doing.

10. We recommend the complete abandonment of Hargreaves’ proposals. We propose a re-think of the whole intellectual property framework based on a proper consultation with those affected. Hargreaves has entirely ignored the proposals and suggestions of those over whose lives he holds so much sway. Both our finances and our morale are already suffering from the laxity of the implementation of existing copyright legislation and our lack of moral rights. A fair proportion of our work is being used without our permission and without payment to us, not only by individuals for their websites etc. but, much more damagingly, by large corporations, national newspapers, publishers and other commercial interests. There seems little or nothing we can do about these abuses. Some photographers spend the greater part of their time taking legal action against infringers with mixed results. Certainly none of them becomes rich. And anyway we do not have the mentality or the wherewithal to do this. Our property has every right to be protected in the same way as all other legitimate property. Artists and creators depend on building a reputation. How can we build a reputation if our photographs are nearly always credited to some agent or giant corporation rather than to ourselves? There should be an absolute right for artists to be credited and paid for their work and for them to remain the inalienable owners.

1 September 2011