Policy background Intellectual property
The 2015 Conservative Party Manifesto committed to protect intellectual property and to make Britain the best place in Europe to innovate, patent new ideas and set up and expand a business. The Act contains a number of intellectual property measures to support creative industries.
	The Public Lending Right Act 1979 provides a right for authors, known as the "public lending right", to receive payments from a central fund in respect of such of their books as are lent out to the public by local library authorities in the United Kingdom. The Digital Economy Act 2010 extended the public lending right to e-books, but only where they are downloaded on the library premises. The 2015 Conservative Party Manifesto committed the government to assist public libraries in embracing the digital age by working with them to ensure remote access to e-books, rather than just access on the library premises. The Act updates the public lending right to enable this.
	The main ‘physical’ criminal copyright offences in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 ("the 1988 Act") carry a ten-year maximum custodial sentence but the provisions governing online infringement, introduced using secondary legislation in 2003 in the course of implementing the Information Society Directive 2001/29/EC, provide for a maximum two-year sentence. In March 2015 the government published Penalty Fair, a study of criminal sanctions for copyright infringement available under the 1988 Act. This recommended that the offence for online copyrights infringement was increased to achieve parity with physical copyright infringement. In July 2015 the government published a consultation on changes to the penalties for online copyright infringement. On 21 April 2016 the government published a response to the consultation announcing its intention to legislate to increase the maximum sentence for online copyright infringement to ten years, achieving parity with the physical offence, and also to re-draft the offence to address wider concerns about the offence provisions themselves. The Act implements the necessary changes.
	Registered design owners can stamp or label their products with the word ‘registered’ and the relevant registered design numbers in order to ensure that anyone who infringes the design cannot later claim they were unaware of the registration, and so be excused from paying damages to the owner. The optional marking of a product in this way to make others aware of the intellectual property protection afforded to the product is sometimes called providing "constructive notice". Multiple rights may subsist in a single product, and these may lapse or be revoked at different points in time. As it is an offence to represent falsely that a design in any product is a registered design, products had to be re-marked when the details changed, which is costly, both in terms of time and money. The Act amends the Registered Designs Act 1949 to provide design owners with the option of marking a product with the address of a website which links the product with the relevant registered design numbers as an alternative way of providing constructive notice.
	Section 73 of the 1988 Act exempts cable platforms, such as Virgin Media, from paying copyright licence fees to retransmit the core public service broadcaster channels, such as ITV1. The provision exists to support the specific policy objective of supporting the development of cable television infrastructure in the 1980s and 1990s. In March 2015 the government published: The balance of payments between television platforms and public service broadcasters: Options for deregulation, consulting on, amongst other things, repealing section 73. It was proposed that the measure was no longer relevant with the development of multi-channel and digital TV on satellite, terrestrial and increasingly internet based platforms. The Act repeals section 73. In the government’s view, with over 4.5 million cable subscribers across the country, many of whom use the service for far more than just television, the objective of developing cable infrastructure is now met through other legislative measures such as reform of the electronic communications code – as above. Following consultation on transitional arrangements following the repeal of section 73, on 10 February 2017 the government concluded that section 73 can be repealed without a transition period.