Hargreaves Reports - a call to action or a punt into the long grass?

Professor Ian Hargreaves' Report is now publicly available.  For background, see our earlier postings here and here.  At 123 pages, it will take us a while to digest, so here are just a couple of initial comments.
The initial impression is that there is confusion over whether the goal is to promote innovation alone, or the protection and exploitation of innovation (i.e. IP).  Whilst innovation is "Mom-and-apple-pie" aspirational stuff, turning innovation into growth by the innovator (not just free-rider growth somewhere else) requires strong IP, in my humble opinion.
Although this was trailed in advance as a generally pro-IP exercise by a government looking for ways out of an economic mess, Hargreaves actually appears to accept the (increasingly fashionable) message that IP is a burden on industry - "IP transaction costs have risen as rights users navigate an ever more densely populated landscape of increasingly subdivided rights" is one of the underlying general themes. 
What of designs?  The mood music of Chapter 7 on designs is that the system involves "unnecessary complexity" (for which the cure will, we expect, be to scrap some of the laws which protect designs at present), and that "some argue that copying in the fashion industry may actually promote innovation". 
How does that square with his rallying call in the executive summary: "Action is also called for with regard to the UK’s important and growing design sector"?  The answer lies in the nature of this "action".  What would you have expected to see down in the detail?  If you said "an evidence-based assessment", go to the head of the class - you are fully in tune with the governance of coalition Britain.  
No one would disagree that "Government should ensure that development of the IP System is driven as far as possible by objective evidence" - again,  "Mom-and-apple-pie" stuff; shouldn't all policy be based on objective evidence (rather than, say, by short-term credit crises, ideology, or the search for eye-catching initiatives with which a politician can be personally associated) if possible?  The practical problem is that "as far as possible" is often not very far at all in a complicated little corner like design rights.  It may be that the requested research will show that (a) good, and/or innovative, design matters, and that (b) protecting it also matters.  However, it is hard to believe that economic research alone will yield a result sufficiently quantitative to form the basis of an informed decision to, say, keep or scrap UK unregistered design right, or increase its term from 10 to 12 years. 
Is the "Digital Copyright Exchange" just compulsory licensing under a new name?  Is there really any scope for "Judge Judy Justice" for small IP claims?  Is the report distorted by the emphasis on digital age copyright?  Has it seriously engaged with design issues?  Or is the call for further research just kicking the ball back into the long grass?
Read it, and let us have your comments.

Hargreaves to enter the UK's IP Maze

Following Gordon Brown’s Gowers Report, it has clearly become a British constitutional convention that the oft-repeated task of reviewing IP law be given to a financial journalist - no experience of, or qualification in, law, IP, business or economics required.
Andrew Gowers himself left his job as editor of the FT (in his own words “not entirely voluntarily”) and, after the Gowers Report, went on to work at Lehmans, then BP, and academia. New Labour, Lehmans, BP ... a whole flotilla of sinking ships. In the end, Mr Gowers didn't do such a bad job on IP, so we wish him well in future, and hope he can swim.
His counterpart on David Cameron's hastily-announced IP Review (described in the Daily Telegraph as an "ineffectual waste of money") is to be Ian Hargreaves, who, after working at the FT, was editor at the Independent before being parachuted into editing the ever-ailing New Statesman by Geoffrey Robinson (New Labour’s Paymaster General); since then he has held a number of lobbying and consulting posts in and around Whitehall, and is a Professor within the Meeja Studies group at Cardiff University.
Hargreaves sounds, from his appearances on Radio 4's Moral Maze, like a nice, liberally-inclined fellow - but is he ready for the IP Maze? His only prior connection with the task seems to be a report he did called "The Heart of Digital Wales" (that beating heart is, we presume, located not too far from Cardiff), which was more concerned with spending Welsh funds within the existing system than with reforming it.
We suspect that this is just another "mission impossible" which will enable poor Hargreaves (like his predecessor) to blast the IP ball deep into the long grass for a while, like any good enquiry should.
As Gowers said, after completing his work, "You have to start from the realisation that intellectual property is in fact a global system. It just happens to operate through national jurisdictions. So the idea that dear old Britain would somehow reinvent the rules of the road and in just one country is almost laughable you know." Prepare to laugh.

No. 10 Petitions

Dids McDonald, of Anti Copying In Design (ACID), has started two online petitions. The first encourages the government to criminalise design right infringement, and the second to introduce higher damages. I have signed the second without a moment's hesitation.
The first raises a really important issue. The threat of criminal sanctions certainly works much better than civil penalties, so I can see the attraction.
However, personally, I have always strongly opposed them, not because I am pro-infringer but because criminalising is usually disproportionate to an economic misdeed, and can therefore create martyrs, who have a tendency to turn into folk heroes - like the Pirate Party. The challenge these days is to persuade the public that it is IP creators and those who risk their money to back them, who are the good guys, and it is hard to cast heavy-handed enforcers in that heroic mold.

Working Groups cease work

After many years, the Registry Practice Working Group (RPWG), which had inherited the mantle of the Designs Practice Working Group (DWPG), has now been dissolved. This wasn't at the users' request - these were, in my personal experience, very useful groups.
It was announced at the last (in both senses) meeting of RPWG in June. "Higher level" issues will now be discussed in a new forum called the Trade Marks and Designs Policy Forum. This will deal with policy (as the name implies) and also "significant legal and practice changes". However, "minor issues relating to registry operations and practice will be dealt with elsewhere" - apparently in an online forum.
What is one to make of this? UK trade mark and, particularly, design filings are much more by unrepresented applicants - domestic SMEs and individuals - than in the past, as large companies and foreign applicants have used the European or International routes. I suppose, therefore, that there is perceived to be rather less need to meet representatives. On the other hand, there is no one else to represent the unrepresented.
Perhaps the Registry has merely tired of discussing "minor", or what I'd call bread-and-butter, issues in person. I am generally a fan of electronic forum use. They enable wider consultations. However, I don't think they substitute for human contact. The RPWG and DPWG meetings were a two way street, and what we will miss is not what the Registry gets from us - we can say anything we need electronically - but the chance to recieve information and, more importantly, the feeling that we have been heard, and perhaps understood. I may have got this all wrong, but this move is close enough in time to the IPO's "IP Complaints" fiasco for it to feel like the Registry is trying to disengage from the professions - and if that is right, I suspect that, in the long term, both sides (and therefore, in the long run, applicants and the public) will lose out.

EU Design Consultation

OHIM's website brings news of a new EU consultation on design. Based on the Commision Working Document "Design as a driver of user-centred innovation", the consultation is open until 26 June.

Here's the opening of the Executive Summary of the Working Document:

The Commission Staff Working Document on ‘Design as a driver of user-centred innovation’ analyses the contribution of design to innovation and competitiveness. The results are compelling: companies that invest in design tend to be more innovative, more profitable and grow faster than those who do not. At a macro-economic level, there is a strong positive correlation between the use of design and national competitiveness.
Although often associated with aesthetics and the ‘looks’ of products only, the application of design is in reality much broader. User needs, aspirations and abilities are the starting point and focus of design activities. With a potential to integrate for example environmental, safety and accessibility considerations — in addition to economic — into products, services and systems, design is an area which deserves public attention.

According to the Commission, the Working Document "provides an analysis of the rationale for making design an integral part of European innovation policy." The aim of the consultation "is to find out whether more should be done at EU level in the area of design and if so, what." My answer is that more funding and training ought to be put into anti-piracy measures to stem the tide of ripoffs.