Written evidence submitted by Villayat Sunkmanitu

1. I wish to make a submission to the select committee responsible for conducting the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property.

 

* No protection against ‘metadata’ stripping

* No protection of moral rights afforded by the two Human Rights Acts relevant to us. Proposed scheme contravenes existing legislation.

* Any global scheme must be internationally recognised and enforceable by     international law

* Awareness of the needs of disabled artists

 

2. I am a photographer poet and writer and I run an independent stock image library and I publish my poetry and other works. I am a disabled artist. I earn by selling prints and licensing images for magazine, book and website usage (see www.wolf-photography.com).  It is becoming increasingly difficult to make a living as an artist and legislation which fails to adequately protect artists’ rights is one of the issues contributing to the situation.

3. I am deeply concerned about the proposed changes to take place in the areas of copyright and orphan works.

4. The Information Technology age has given us more access and versatility in the way that we work as creative people but has also opened a lot more routes to those people that would seek to profit from the hard work of others and abuse their rights by breaching copyright laws.

5. It is right that my work should be protected by the law.  United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 27 (2) states:

'Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary

or artistic production of which he is the author.' Please click here for more information on this subject http://www.stop43.org.uk/pages/news_and_resources_files/9f95e713e47225fa4d19f9a80ee738a2-107.php

It follows that any proposed legislation to enable the commercial use of orphan works or the extended collective licensing of copyright works, which is intended to result in a copyright holder in practice being 'deprived of his possessions' without his knowledge or consent (which Mr. Justice Arnold has judged to be the consequence for rightsholders of piracy of their copyright work) would breach Article 1 of the First Protocol of the Human Rights Act 1998 .

The Human Rights Act 1998 restrains the Government from introducing legislation that is not compliant with human rights legislation, and indeed reading Section 6 it may be unlawful for civil servants even to draw up such legislation. When asked at a pre-consultation meeting on 23rd August 2011 attended by Stop43, among others, Matt Cope of the Intellectual Property Office confirmed that new UK legislation must be compliant with the Human Rights Act 1998.

6. I believe that France and other European countries have an exemplary attitude towards this issue in line with the Human Rights Act.  As another European country that prides itself on being fair to its citizens, we should be doing the same.

7. Moral rights are of fundamental importance to artists, such as the right to be credited. It is through this right that my work becomes known, my name is my brand. Yet UK law does not enforce an automatic right to be credited, nor has Professor Hargreaves proposals remedied this deficiency.

8. My images have digital copyright information embedded within them (metadata) so that should anyone wish to license use of the image from me they are able to contact me. Yet there is no law that prevents organisations from stripping digital copyright information from my images, this is known as metadata stripping, thus rendering them orphans. I have to prove that they ‘had an intent to infringe my copyright’, something that is impossible to prove in most cases, yet my image has now been rendered an orphan. This happens to untold millions of images every day, all created as orphans, yet there is no legislation planned that would criminalise such an act.

9. If the proposed changes to Orphan works go ahead, I foresee a huge increase in the abuse of copyrighted material being legalised for use by the commercial sector to the detriment of the creative person, this is clearly immoral.  If a proposed piece of legislation seems immoral, it needs to be stopped and changed until it resembles something workable.  Laws should be just and fair towards all, not just the well off or those in positions of influence, otherwise they become discriminatory. Large scale commercial use of orphan works will seriously damage the interests of independent creative businesses throughout the UK.

10. The legislation should be addressing basic requirements, eg every artist whose work is used anywhere, in a book on a website, on the radio etc, must be appropriately credited. This puts the responsibility on the user to ensure that they have acted legally and sought appropriate permissions and, where required, paid the licence fees.

11. Any scheme to force artists to register their art digitally must be free or for a one off minimal charge otherwise it's an immoral tax on the artist; because of the global nature of internet communication and practises, the scheme must also be global and legally enforceable worldwide or there's no point. What would be the point of having your work registered here in the UK,  only to have someone in the USA, China or India abuse it through internet access because they're not part of the same scheme or not subject to the same legislation?  Creative people that do business on the internet, deal with the whole world - not just the UK.

12. The scheme would also need to take account of access issues for the disabled. Under the Disability Discrimination Act, access goes beyond physical entry. It looks at whether a scheme, programme or service is accessible in other ways. It’s really difficult to assess how the scheme might impact the disabled as the vast range of disabilities would have different difficulties. Careful thought would need to be put into making it accessible for anything like this to work. This goes beyond large print and a dark typeface as it’s also to do with the language used and cost. If the charge for the system isn't a one off minimal charge for the disabled, how are they supposed to be protected? You then have the issue of people with serious visual impairment that work through touch alone. Mental health difficulties present particular hurdles on accessibility - will the scheme be easily understood, easy to use and not cause frustration and antagonise existing mental health difficulties that could worsen behavioural problems? One must also be aware that people with long term physical disabilities may well have some mental health difficulties too as part of living with their existing conditions.

13. If someone used a Canon camera and took the logos off and tried to pass it off as their own product, Canon would have recourse to legal remedies.  Why aren't artists protected in the same way?

2 September 2011