UK Government Order Review of IP Rights

quaker5567 writes "The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, has ordered an independent review of intellectual property rights in the UK. The review will be led by Andrew Gowers, formerly the editor of London newspaper The Financial Times. The review will look into the awarding of IP rights to business, the complexity of current laws and the extent of "fair use" in the current law. Importantly, the review will also examine whether the current term of copyright protection (70 years after the author's death) is appropriate. Andrew Gowers recently criticised the print industry for not realising the true power of the digital platform, comparing them to a record company which specialises in vinyl."

Comments

Re:This really is not flamebait...

[meringuoid]

I was at a lunch once with Michael Heseltine (centrist Conservative) where he likened many industry bodies to the Trade Unions and said that if Britain was to modernise they had to be defeated just as much as the miners and the print unions had to.

Heseltine, I fear, is among the last of a dying breed. He and Kenneth Clarke are all that remains of the Tories as they once were, the party of old Mr Heath. I wouldn't attach too much hope to him.

Many of the rest are hideous Little Thatchers. Authoritarian, xenophobic, possibly racist, shameless panderers to the Daily Mail. God help us. Fortunately, they're the ones who have failed dismally to bother Blair for the best part of a decade now.

You may be right in hoping for something from Cameron. From what I've read, he has a lot of support among younger Tories of a libertarian persuasion. These are the ones who are keen on things like flat tax rates and so forth. I'm not especially keen on that, but they are at least liberal capitalists, rather than scary authoritarians like Thatcher was. They may well be open to a line of reasoning about over-long copyrights and software patents being unfair government-backed monopolies, and be persuaded to liberalise the regulations in the name of the free market...