Call to Action!
On Tuesday 16th April the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill enters its final Parliamentary phase before becoming law. This is your last chance to remove from it the damaging Orphan Works and Extended Collective Licensing Clause 79. Please contact your MP and other Parliamentarians, making the following recommendations:
- Remove the Orphan Works and Extended Collective Licensing Clause 79 from the ERR Bill
- Implement the EU Orphan Works Directive at the last possible moment, because it directs us to breach our obligations to foreign rights owners under the Berne Convention
- Revisit IP in an Intellectual Property Bill once the Copyright Hub is operational and the government has a metadata policy, which at the moment it does not
- Return responsibility for copyright to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Patentsare limited formal economic rights granted by Government upon application, and rightly handled by the Patents Office (which is an Agency of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and of which ‘Intellectual Property Office’ is an operating name). Copyright is an informal automatic combined economic, cultural and human right. It is far more appropriate for the Department for Culture to be responsible for this more subtle right than the Department for Business.
Read more about what you need to know at Stop43.org.uk
Key Contacts
MPs. The ERRB returns to the Commons on 16 April.
Contact your local MP. Tweet them if you can.
• WriteToThem.com is the quickest and easiest way to write a message to your MP
• Here are some guidelines on composing letters to parliamentarians.
• You can call Parliament and leave a message, guaranteed to get to any parliamentarian, on
020 7219 3000
Learn more about how to contact and Tweet a Peer.
