Intellectual Property (Unjustified Threats) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2016-11-23
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Judith Wilcox (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, after being on the committee entrusted by the House with scrutiny of this Bill, I am only too fully aware of what a complex area of law intellectual property is—it is crucial that we get it right. We must ensure that we create a climate as positive as any in the world for businesses to innovate and grow, especially after we leave the European Union I thank the Minister for her clear thinking and her ability to make me understand exactly what was going on. I thought when I started that I would never get to the end of it all. However, it was quite amazing: with her experience as a fine civil servant who then transferred over to work in the wild business world, she came back with all kinds of straightforward thinking that I could understand and comply with I am confident that the Bill will make a valuable contribution to achieving this goal. It will make it easier for businesses to make legitimate threats to protect their intellectual property and for those businesses subject to unjustified threats to protect themselves. I am particularly glad that the Bill will harmonise the law across different types of intellectual property and make it simpler and cheaper for businesses, especially small businesses, which can often be the most intimidated by threats, to seek legal advice and negotiate before there is a need to involve the courts. The greater clarity created by the new category of permitted communications is most welcome in this regard. The Bill is therefore a significant improvement on the current law and has the potential to make a real difference for businesses in practice As a former small business owner who has been subject to threats to sue for intellectual property infringement, a consumer protection representative and a Minister for Intellectual Property, I also understand, however, quite how impenetrable intellectual property law can be for businesses. This is especially the case for small and medium-sized enterprises, which often struggle to understand complex legal points and are least able to afford expert legal advice when they encounter difficulties When I was running my small business, I was once contacted by a well-known company in the same industry alleging that I had fringed its intellectual property rights. It turned out that it did not have a leg to stand on from a legal point of view. Nevertheless, the whole episode still caused me and my business a great deal of disruption. While I recognise that I would have been a primary actor for the purposes of this Bill, and therefore not protected by the threats provision, I empathise wholeheartedly with those businesses for which these are crucial protections but for which intellectual property law is incredibly hard to understand For this reason, getting the legislation right is only half of the battle. Just as important—perhaps even more so—is how we seek to ensure that businesses understand what is in the Bill and how it helps them in practical terms. If we do not do this properly, we might as well not pass the Bill at all While I know from my time as a Minister that the Intellectual Property Office works hard to help businesses understand intellectual property, it needs to ensure that it keeps improving its efforts in this area. It would be unacceptable and a tragedy if even one start-up or SME capitulated to an unjustified threat to sue for intellectual property infringement out of a lack of awareness of the provisions of the Bill once enacted I was grateful to the Minister for her comments in Committee on how the Government intend to proceed to make sure that the provisions of the Bill are communicated to business, especially SMEs, so that it has the positive impact in practice that it ought to. However, this is one of the things about which we cannot ever have too much information or too many reassurances. I therefore continue to press the Minister to assist the House and businesses with further reassurances, wherever she can, on this matter.