Government outlines new creative industries' rights agency

The agency was proposed in the Government's recent Digital Britain report as one of the measures aimed at reducing the amount of copyright infringement and piracy in the UK.

The Government has asked industry to come up with a plan for what the agency should do, and has said that its proposed anti-piracy legislation depends on the degree to which the creative industries engage in its anti-piracy plans.

"We have set out here a model which allows industry to keep control of how this environment is created. This model depends on a strong rights agency that can and does require specific actions of its members," said its consultation with industry on the rights agency. "We do not wish to be more prescriptive in legislation - that would not be the best outcome for anyone – including rights holders."

"If we are not convinced that industry is willing or able to deliver an effective rights agency we will need to think about alternative ways to approach the issue," it said. "However clear the Government's commitment to tackling piracy we cannot, through legislation, provide anything like the whole answer to this complex area and the answer that we do find might prove to be short lived, even counter-productive if we are forced to be prescriptive, and that pushes infringement towards more difficult to detect methods."

The digital britain report proposed new laws that would force internet service providers (ISPs) to gather information on copyright infringing customers and pass it on to rights holders when presented with a court-issued warrant.

The Government said that the agency's role would be not just one of enforcement, and that it would have to work alongside planned legislation.

"We see it working alongside some specific legislative proposals that we believe will make an impact to reduce the incidence of unlawful peer-to-peer file-sharing and, in so doing, start to share responsibility for changing and challenging wide-scale infringement," said the consultation. "Put at its most ambitious, our vision for a rights agency is to facilitate a major change of approach across the whole value chain as to how content is provided, packaged and sold to consumers."

It said, though, that the agency must be an industry body and not another regulator. "We are not proposing that Government should set up and run [the] agency. This is emphatically not a proposal for a new government regulator," said the proposal. "Instead, we are inviting industry to come together to create a body that could tackle those parts of this agenda that are for industry to deal with."

The Government proposes that the body support any legislation the Government passes, that it try to come up with technical fixes to digital copying, and that it have a role in educating the public about piracy and encouraging people not to engage in it.

The Government has asked for responses to its proposals by 30th March.