British Library, Open Rights Group and ISPs accused of - Wired.co.uk

The chief executive of the Publishers Association has accused organisations including the British Library and the Open Rights Group of using the language of freedom of expression "as a cloak for their tawdry theft".

Speaking at the Westminster Media Forum, Richard Mollet said that these organisations, along with research councils, ISPs and search engines were trying to erode copyright and that using the language of freedom of expression was a "grotesque attempt to draw moral equivalence between stealing someone's work and the struggle for political representation".

The Publishers Association objects to certain parts of the British Library's response to the government's consultation on copyright. The Library supports copying and datamining as a means to interrogate data for non-commercial research. "Currently we face a situation where for legal copyright reasons medical researchers are not able to mine the very minutes of science in the form of journal articles, and yet currently the law allows the mining of personal data for perhaps less prosaic purposes such as online shopping recommendations," said the British Library in its response document.

The Publishers Association has warned against proposals to relax copyright law to allow for datamining, photocopying in schools and private copying, however it does support incremental changes such as releasing orphan works and digitally preserving archives. It argues that the Consultation on Copyright is based on a "skewed analysis of the Hargreaves Review", which "failed to account for the potential impact on the significant economic and cultural contributions made by the creative industries."

The PA also believes that introducing elements of an American-style "fair use" exception would "create legal ambiguity and put a chokehold on innovation".

A British Library spokesperson declined to comment on Mollet's speech, but the Open Rights Group's executive director Jim Killock told Wired.co.uk:

I am not sure why Richard Mollet wishes to attack ORG in the way he does. It strikes me as a very personal viewpoint, rather than one that seeks to show true leadership of a public-facing association.

I say this because publishers are being tremendously successful in their transition to ebooks. Yes, some wrongful copying of ebooks will happen. But it is poor advocacy to concentrate on this phenomenon as if it were a threat to copyright itself, or even the main concern of the industry. To do so makes the Publishers Association look like they prefer to preach doom and failure, rather than working as a beacon of success. And publishers have been very successful with ebooks.

Richard also makes a strategic error when he accuses the British Library and ORG of wishing to weaken copyright. The Publishers Association has opposed flexibilities we support, like permission to parody or text mine. Yet these flexibilities would create true strength. Flexible systems are stronger.

Hard line enforcement, like the Digital Economy Act, internet censorship and ACTA are very dangerous to the public and the copyright industries. They risk the legitimacy of the system. People are not prepared to tolerate hard-line copyright laws that endanger other rights.

Update 18:00 29/05/2012: Richard Mollet, chief executive of the Publishers Association, told Wired.co.uk: "You can update copyright law without reducing the ability of content creators to control their works. Erosion of copyright takes place when copyright holders lose the ability to control their works, for example through creating a blanket exception to format shifting or text mining."

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