Protection of Freedoms Bill

My Lords, I support Amendments 55A and 56. I must confess the interest of being a working professor in one of our universities. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Henley, who has spent much time with those of us who have been concerned about these matters. I am very grateful to him for that. The Government’s view is that the exemptions already present mean that many of the fears held in this Chamber are unjustified. I want to make one brutal, simple and crude point, which partly picks up on the points already made by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin. We must think about multinational concerns and how the country is viewed from outside. For example, let us take the case of our libel law. Our senior judiciary genuinely believes that it is wrong to believe that London is the libel capital of the universe. Genuinely, it says, ““If you look more closely at the facts of the case, it is not quite so””. Perhaps that is right; perhaps it is wrong. The world has made up its mind that London is the libel capital of the universe. That clearly affects the way that the world behaves. It may be unfair, but the world has made up its mind. Similarly, in this case, it is not worth taking the risk of the world making up its mind that there might be this or that exemption in existing law but somehow universities in the United Kingdom are not as secure places to invest in research as universities in France or the Republic of Ireland—or even in Scotland—where there are higher barriers. I wish to underline that brutal point about international perception. Unfortunately, my noble friend Lady O'Neill has had to go. I want to make one point which I know was on her mind in moving her amendment. Her concern relates to public authorities—here, meaning universities and other publicly funded institutes—being required to release research data sets on which they hold copyright in a reusable form without any conditions on their subsequent dissemination. A research data set that is released without conditions on its further use is, in effect, made available to the entire world and so will be fully available in jurisdictions where respect for intellectual property is poor and remedies for its violation are non-existent. In other words, we are talking about something entirely different from the case involving Cambridge, King’s College London and Professor Crick, which we talked about earlier. It is an entirely different utilisation of another person’s data set. I was discussing this with a distinguished researcher at our university at the weekend. She said to me, ““Actually, I’m sitting on a very sophisticated data set and it is just about possible that I am not asking the rights questions of it. There might be somebody in another United Kingdom university who would ask different questions and could do something with it. It is just about possible that that might be so””. However, the danger—and it is the concern that the amendment of my noble friend Lady O’Neill addresses—is: if we do not control the reusable aspects of such an exchange, we will leave ourselves open in a way which is not sensible from a national point of view. I am sure it is the view of my noble friend Lady O’Neill that we cannot ignore the reality that science is both international and competitive and that sophisticated science is now done in some places where there is scant respect for intellectual property. An unreciprocated requirement for United Kingdom university researchers to provide any data sets that they create and hold without any conditions on their republication or dissemination will damage the competitive position of UK researchers and so of UK science.