Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I wish to share time with Senator O'Toole.

I welcome the Minister of State and his officials to the House. I was not going to refer to keeping people awake at night because there has been enough talk about insomnia on this. I offer my sympathy to the Minister of State on this detailed Bill. I had to read the following sentence in the Minister of State's speech half a dozen times before I understood it:

The changes provide that methods of treatment of the human or animal body and diagnostic methods practised on the human body which had previously been excluded from patentability under section 9 by the fiction of their lack of industrial applicability are now included as exceptions to patentability on public policy grounds under section 10.

That we are discussing a Bill which first saw the light of day in the last millennium, as Senator Coghlan stated, sends a clear message to the world which, from the point of view of Ireland, is far from desirable. It reflects a regrettable fact about this country, which is, that we do not take seriously enough the question of intellectual property. We cannot continue like this. If we want to become a leading light in the knowledge society whose very lifeblood is intellectual property, we cannot hope to be taken seriously by therest of the world if we treat intellectual property with scant respect, as we in this country tend to do.

For instance, every year the software industry publishes figures of the proportion of Irish computers that use pirate software, and those figures are shocking. I could perhaps understand it if this was a poor Third World country where people simply cannot afford to pay the retail price of software. Not only is this not a poor Third World country, this is a rich country that also has the potential to present itself as one of the world's leading sources of software for various purposes. What a paradox that is, to be at the same time a leader in the production of software and also a leader in the pirating of software. Nobody seems to care much about this contradiction.

Our indifference extends to intellectual property far beyond software. There is in this country a thriving black market in counterfeit goods of all kinds. The list of cheap knock-offs of leading clothing and footwear brands and counterfeit CDs and DVDs of music and films is a long one and so are the queues of people who line up to buy these illicit products.

There are laws on the Statute Book that make the infringement of intellectual property a crime and today we are in the process of adding to that body of law, but these laws seem to have little support from the public and it also seems that little energy is put into that task of enforcing them. I realise that Ireland is not the only country where this applies. I was in Italy a few months ago and I could not believe the amount of counterfeit goods such as watches and handbags being sold. The police force there seemed to ignore such activity. The same applies in many other countries, but we have made serious investment in this area and therefore it matters to ensure that it is understood.

The Bill is driven, not by any wish to protect intellectual property but instead by the wish to conform to the international treaties and agreements on intellectual property to which this country has signed up in the past. We should ask ourselves if we are conforming to our international obligations merely by putting these laws onto our Statue Book. Is there not also a burden on the State to energetically enforce the laws we pass? That is the real challenge to us. Are we not obliged to educate our people on the rights and wrongs of intellectual property? Senator Leyden referred to this aspect. We have a job to do in enforcing the laws and educating people in terms of understanding them.

Our casual attitude to copyright and patent infringement reminds me a little of the way some people look on the making of false insurance claims. Senator O'Toole has played a large part in changing that attitude in recent times with the work that he has been doing, but it seems that false insurance claims were not regarded as something to be ashamed of in the past. Ripping off an insurance company, some used think, was a victimless crime and some may continue to hold that view. In reality, of course, it is anything but that since, ultimately, it is not the insurance company that pays but the general body of policyholders, in other words the customers.

Despite this, we get the same kind of double think that allows people complain about high insurance rates while at the same time turning a blind eye to those who try to rip off the purpose of insurance by making false or exaggerated claims. In this regard I have been most impressed in recent times by the advertisements, not from the State but by insurance companies and others who have come together, to remind people they are breaking the law and to encourage others to report them.

Stealing intellectual property is not a victimless crime. Offenders sometimes take refuge in the defence that the people who are hurt are the big guys who can afford to take that punishment. It is difficult to feel sorry for Microsoft but it is easy to feel at least a twinge of sympathy for someone whose victim is the richest man in the world. It is equally difficult to feel sorry for songwriters or film production company executives who tend to be mega millionaires as a result of what they have created. All that tends to ignore the basic reason we have laws to protect intellectual property. They are in place to guarantee their creators a profit from their endeavours, not to enrich people as such but to encourage them to continue creating new concepts and ideas and to encourage other people to imitate them. Ultimately, laws on intellectual property are for the benefit of those who enjoy the creations, not the creators. At the extreme, if a person who creates intellectual property could not profit from it, all his or her creative effort and innovation would die out and every time software is pirated or a counterfeit compact disc is bought, the basic principle of rewarding the creator is diluted.

In our own selfish interest, we, in this country, cannot permit this to happen. In this war against the stealing of intellectual property, there is no doubt about which side we need to be on. The knowledge society is our future in Ireland and one of the clear implications of that is we should be among the leaders in protecting intellectual property. We need to do more than go through the motions of passing laws such as this, as we also need to be energetic in enforcing our intellectual property laws. We must encourage and educate our people to add to them. I welcome the Bill.