Artist’s Resale Right Regulations

My Lords, this is a perfectly dreadful set of regulations and I very much welcome the attempt by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, to make them slightly less bad. I have absolutely no interests to declare, although my late father-in-law was quite a well-known artist; had he not died tragically young, I somehow doubt that he would have had much to say in favour of these regulations. It is ironic that the regulations purport to deal with intellectual property, when there is no intellectual, or indeed moral, case for them at all. For a start, they benefit only random forms of artistic creativity, including, for example, collages, prints, lithographs, tapestries, photographs and ceramics hand-painted in factories, as in Stoke-on-Trent, even though in many of these categories the items are rarely signed and are therefore often untraceable. Excluded are, for example, books, including those expensively bound in hand-tooled leather; hand-crafted furniture, which can fetch thousands of pounds; expensive hand-woven knitwear incorporating original designs and expensive threads, which can cost hundreds of pounds; stained glass; musical instruments, so I believe; and, indeed, buildings—many architects consider their buildings to be works of art, notwithstanding that some people may regard some office blocks in the City of London to be the architectural equivalent of Damien Hirst rather than of Rembrandt. Illuminated manuscripts and fine replicas of 18th-century long-case clocks are grey areas. Perhaps the Minister might be able to clarify the state of affairs here. Whether the artist gets the money to which the EU claims he is morally entitled depends entirely on how the object that he has created changes hands. If it is sold privately—or, for example, on eBay—he gets nothing whatever. The expenses of collection and of keeping tabs on every photograph or ceramic object—neither of which, as I said, is normally signed—just in case it might in the future shoot up in value to around £700 will be horrendous. All this is made worse by the Government’s last-minute decision to lower the threshold from €3,000 to €1,000, approximately £680. The rake-off of something selling for this price is a princely £27.20 gross. How much of this will reach the artist after the expenses of collection? We are told—and the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, has confirmed—that the latter will average 25 per cent, but the percentage will surely be higher on lower-priced items. A fee of £6.80 could hardly cover the costs here. Like the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, I find the £1 cost of collection cited by the Minister frankly unbelievable. In France, as the Times yesterday pointed out, the people who will really benefit from laws like this are the heirs of famous artists such as Picasso, not the small, struggling, unfashionable artist. I hope that the Government will stick to their guns where deceased artists are concerned. The matter demonstrates how crazy the Government are to agree to further and further extensions of QMV, thereby allowing the EU to intrude still further into the nooks and crannies of our everyday lives, in the immortal words of the noble Lord, Lord Hurd. Luckily, an Irish artist, Mr. Dominic Penny, who lives in Dublin, is appealing to the European Court, claiming that the legislation is a clear infringement of his human rights. He is outraged at what he calls,"““Brussels’ interference in his copyright, his rights to form a contract and his rights to say who should or should not benefit from his estate””." Let us wish him every success in his legal challenge. Meanwhile, let us support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, which, if carried, will at least pave the way for the legislation to be improved to some extent.