Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property

Written evidence submitted by David Reid

I am a creative, artist and photographer.

I have been in the publishing industry for more than 20 years and had been unemployed since 2009 over copyright rights issue with my previous business partner and am now suing over a legal battle over rights just so this person will pay me the money I am owed for working with him. 

So far this cost me my livelihood, business and home and is still ongoing and this is all being personally funded.

To make ends meet I have lucky enough to get a job with a digital company in London and am barely making ends meet.

The move from hard copy to digital has meant to me the proliferation of global companies and individuals to steal an original creatives work for creative commercial benefit with no compensation to the original owner.

I have seen this first hand and as a artist with a website have seen my own work stolen more than once by individuals and larger corporations, My only recourse, to write a strongly wording email to the offending company/individual.

I am very concerned that with the rights issue under question at present that anyone would be able to steal my work and recreate it, packaging with their own name and sell it without any reward or recognition to myself.

As a struggling artist, my rights appear to be trampled on by anyone who feels they could do a better job at selling my work than me.

This is not fair.

British Industry has been built around art creative innovation and industry only to have it stolen by other people. 

As Eric Schmidt pointed out recently, after attacking the educational system, he said Britain should look to the "glory days" of the Victorian era for reminders of how the two disciplines can work together.

"It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges," he said. "Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet."

Schmidt also added, "Britain invented computers in both concept and practice" before highlighting that the world's first office computer "was built in 1951 by the Lyons chain of teashops".

Also he said, "The UK is the home of so many media-related inventions. You invented photography. You invented TV," he said. "Yet today, none of the world's leading exponents in these fields are from the UK." He added: "Thank you for your innovation, thank you for your brilliant ideas. You're not taking advantage of them on a global scale."

Our rights should just be handed away to global companies or individuals just because we are not able to market them correctly or more efficiently than the other company up the road.

Our rights should be protected for this very reason. Globalisation and the digital age is ruining the small industry, something that this country built and appears to be throwing it away.

I object to my rights being eaten up by the Googles, Tesco, Facebooks etc of this world and would like tighter controls over copyright and better sanctions to protect us artists in future.

7 September 2011