Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and the opportunity to debate this Bill on Committee Stage. I echo the words of Senator Norris about my Trinity colleague, Professor Eoin O'Dell. I thank him for his engagement with so many of us on this Bill and on potential amendments to it. Speaking on Second Stage, I pointed out some of the issues raised by Professor O'Dell which we are hoping to address in these amendments. As Senator Norris has said, they have been proposed by a number of us - not only Senator Norris, myself and the other members of our technical group, Labour Senators Nash, Humphreys and Ó Ríordáin, but also by Senators Boyhan and Warfield. In these amendments, and specifically in the group I am discussing now, amendment Nos. 1 and 3 to 5, inclusive, we are hoping to address the concerns I raised on Second Stage. The concern was that the Bill was unbalanced without amendment because it seems to ignore the copyright review committee's main recommendations in its 2013 report, Modernising Copyright. That committee was chaired by Professor O'Dell.

The recommendations we are concerned about relate to users. To put it simply, we want to ensure that the Bill provides for user rights to format, shift and to back up and to provide for a private copying levying scheme to compensate rights owners accordingly. The difficulty, and Senator Norris expressed this eloquently, is that people may not realise they are carrying out activities that may amount to an infringement of copyright. We must ensure those activities are protected by exceptions, that are permitted by EU law, in the Bill. Exceptions to copyright allowed by EU directive include what I have mentioned - format shifting and backing up. Format shifting means transferring music from one device to another, copying music from a compact disc, CD, to a phone to listen to it or copying a digital video disc, DVD, to a tablet.

These sorts of matters should be excepted where they are done for private purposes and are not damaging the underlying aims of copyright law. We should make exceptions like this in our copyright legislation. I understand the concern from Professor O'Dell. I am no copyright expert nor do I purport to be but the concerns expressed are that the Bill does not take sufficient account of the recommendations in the report on making copies for private use, such as in the ways I have described - format shifting and making backups. We have been told that the main argument in favour of such private copying exceptions is to reflect consumers' reasonable assumptions, basic expectations and widespread practices. That is what the copyright review committee has said. The EU directive permits national law to introduce limitations and exceptions to enable user rights. That is Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.

The specific point is that private copying exceptions for format shifting and backing up, which would be permitted by the directive and were proposed by the committee, are not included in the Bill. If they are and we have missed that, we would be delighted to hear it, as Senator Norris has said. The Minister of State has mentioned that he thinks the concerns we have raised are addressed through this Bill. We are being told that they are not and we are concerned to ensure that they are. Otherwise, the concern is that the law would not be realistic. It would be a law that would, effectively, be unenforceable, unenforced and widely ignored by consumers. Private users and consumers, however, would incur liability if we do not provide for the sort of user rights we are describing. That is the crux of the amendments we are proposing. We do have longer explanations for the need for the amendments but, essentially, they are trying to ensure that the recommendations of the review committee on user rights are enshrined in this law. I will come in at a later stage if debate arises.