Digital Rights Network

deadline: 2006-08-21
email: innovation@patent.gov.uk
url: http://www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/support/

From the UKPO Site

Introduction

1. The Patent Office has been considering how it can deploy its considerable knowledge, resources and expertise to support innovation in the UK beyond our existing support activities and core statutory functions of granting IP rights, serving as a tribunal and providing advice on IP policy to Ministers. To this end, we have prepared a strategy for supporting innovation which is the subject of this consultation. Annex 1, describes how the Office intends contributing to the Government’s innovation support agenda by building on its existing support activities and pursuing new initiatives.

Deadline for Submissions: Extended to 28th of February (was: Thursday 19 January 2006)

CULTURE MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
16 November 2005 No. 11

New inquiry: New media and the creative industries
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee is announcing today a new inquiry into the challenges and opportunities for the creative industries arising from the development of new media platforms. For the purposes of the inquiry, the term "creative industries" includes music, visual broadcasts, sound broadcasts, film, graphic art, design, advertising, fashion and games software.

The recommendations of the Creative Economy were made public back in mid-December (readers may wish to check out previous posts on the subject of the conference). The purpose of producing the recommendations was summarized in the email sent to interested observers:

'The purpose of the Conference, to deliver policy recommendations to the European Commission on behalf of all stakeholders in the creative economy, was successfully achieved through the five Working Groups which met to discuss a range of issues and draw conclusions. The recommendations from each Working Group, along with related papers and photos from the event can be found at the website: www.creativeeconomyconference.org'

At the Enterprise Conference on 2 December 2005, the Chancellor announced that, as part of the Pre-Budget Report 2005 package, he was asking former Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers to lead an Independent Review to examine the UK’s intellectual property framework, reporting to the Chancellor, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in Autumn 2006.

Official website and Ipkat blog

The pan-European Creative Economy conference took place last week in London under the auspices of the UK's presidency of the EU. It was certainly tough to get a place there (I applied and was 'put on the waiting list') but fortunately some non-rights-holder groups did get a look in -- though it appears they were still heavily outnumbered. As a consequence we are fortunate enough to have two thorough summaries which have been posted up in the original Creative Economy thread here: http://drn.okfn.org/node/37. (Ms Gibson's summary contains some very interesting information on the database directive).

From these reports it appears that, sadly, the government continues to listen to only one side of the debate in these matters. This is bad not only for consumers but for creation and innovation in the UK (and EU) economy (creativity and innovation to flourish depend, not on protectionism, but on diversity and competition). Nevertheless it is a promising sign that people such as Ms Childs, Ms Gibson (and I believe Creative Commons) were able to attend -- even a couple of years ago it is doubtful whether such a conference would have contained anyone except the rights-holders.

Link:
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http://www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/enforce05/

Deadline:
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2005-10-07

Who:
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The consultations are open so anyone can respond.

Annex E lists those orgs formally sent a consultation document.

How To Respond
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Please send responses by Friday 7 October 2005 to:

Jeff Watson
Intellectual Property & Innovation Directorate
The Patent Office
Concept House
Cardiff Road
Newport

This morning I attended the IPPR Creative Britannia event. Mr James Purnell, recently appointed Minister for the Creative Industries, gave the keynote speech (the two other speakers were Ekow Eshun of the Institute for Contemporary Arts and Adam Singer Chief Executive of the collecting societies MCPS and PRS). The speech is now up:

http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/press_notices/archive_2005/purnell_creative_inds_speech.htm

Given recent stories in the press about term extensions it had been thought the Minister might make some announcement on this score. In fact he made *no* mention of this at all. The statements on IP were of the traditional kind: IP is important, we need to protect it, "we need an IP framework that balances the needs of consumers, creators, and businesses" (a statement that sits uneasily with the fact that the Creative Industries IP forum -- created by the DCMS last year -- is rights-holder dominated and has focused almost exclusively on piracy). Unsurprisingly there was also no mention of new, more open approaches to content production and distribution in the private or public sector.

The UK Government has launched a major new initiative to promote the uptake of OSS within government, funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime MInister and known as the Open Source Academy. The Academy aims to develop OS aplication for local government, and carry out studies into barriers to uptake, as well as the security of OS platforms against proprietary ones. The three major councils involved in the scheme are Bristol, Cheshire and Birmingham.

The news is welcome, but concerns that the Government's Open Source policy is not entirely joined up were reinforced last month with the news that Microsoft has gained an exemption from the Department for Education and Skills on the rules for school sponsorships, which state that (in other cases) the sponsor may have no commercial interest in the school being sponsored. Read more on the sponsorship rules and how they were apparently altered to allow Microsoft to sponsor 100 schools, some of whom have reportedly cancelled OS projects for fear of upsetting their benefactor.

Unfortunately, they have the declared backing of the UK government. Take a look at this

The title of the conference (hosted by the British Copyright Council) is 'The Creative Economy', but its conclusions are foretold: the conference 'will highlight the absolute necessity of protecting Europe's intellectual property', as if this were the only issue surrounding the creative economy (!).

Now you may muster a wry smile at the fact that those advocating stronger barriers to knowledge-sharing inevitably succumb to this kind of closed thinking, but actually this is scary stuff. There is little opposition to the idea that all we need is stronger IPR, either in Parliament or in the civil service (and the DTI is a powerful department). And the conference is intended to feed into the development of a Europe-wide IP strategy....

The one glimmer of hope is that 'consumer groups' are also to be represented at the conference (although they are bottom of the list after all the other 'stakeholders'. I'll be following this up to see just which consumer groups have been invited and whether people can still register - just as soon as the pepole who man the phones at the DCMS come back from their 2 1/2 hour lunch break....

There are more than twice as many French and German local authorities using open source software, than there are UK authorities, according to a survey.

According to the preliminary results of a survey carried out by a Dutch University, only 32 percent of UK local authorities are using open source software, compared to 71 percent of French, 68 percent of German and 55 percent of Dutch authorities. The results, which include data from 371 local authorities across 13 European countries, were announced by Rishab Ghosh, the programme leader of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) survey, at an open source software conference in London on Thursday. The full results of the survey, which will include data from 750 respondents, are due to be announced in February.

Read the full article.