Tenth section, "Copyright and performers’ property rights: licensing and penalties", Clauses 42 and 43 here.

Clause 42 : Extension and regulation of licensing of copyright and performers' rights. Big debate. Orphan works is a very contentious topic, especially in the case of photographs. What's an orphan work? It's a work (photograph, film, video, book, whatever) that doesn't have an author, because nobody can figure out who made it. Therefore, it's an 'orphan'. Why is this an issue? Because works that have no known author, but are not designated as 'orphans', cannot be released to the public because of current copyright laws. The basic statistics, provided by Lord Howarth of Newport, are staggering: "over 40 per cent of [the British Library's] archive collections may be orphan works" and a study found that "up to 50 per cent of works in large archives were orphan works and, indeed, that in excess of 50 million orphan works were held in somewhat more than 500 organisations which were surveyed". All of this valuable material is completely off-limits to the public, ridiculously, because of current copyright law.

Lord Howarth also gave the example of "a series of unpublished interviews held in the 1960s and 1970s at St-Mary-le-Bow church in the City of London, 302 hours were recorded as being spent by British Library staff and their paid contractors in looking for 259 rights holders". How many did they find? Fourteen. Given that the original project wasn't done for a commercial purpose, wasting so much time on "fruitless searches for rights holders is really not a sensible or, I would suggest, a proper use of public resources" - indeed, "much of the cultural sector is agreed on wanting an exception in copyright law for orphan works", so something clearly needs to be done. The Tories, although pleased with the principle, were not convinced with the drafting of the clause. Lord Howard of Rising said that the "desire to use genuine orphan works must not lead to any weakening of legitimate copyrights". The problem lies in determining what is and isn't orphaned, via a search. How detailed the search must be is unclear, however, and this could cause problems.

Lord Young of Norwood Green tried to relax the Tories by insisting that the bodies searching for rights holders must be "authorised and regulated and will have to carry out a diligent search". He later gave us another amazing statistic: apparently, "the BBC has roughly 1 million hours of [orphaned] programming". My word. People were still worried that the clause could be exploited - people such as "freelance photographers" and "the Royal Photographic Society". I suppose it's easy to pretend you don't know who took a picture and use it for free. Lord Clement-Jones was convinced that we would have "what is traditionally called the wash-up at the other end" (meaning the Commons), and boy was he right.

The government moved a large group of amendments, introduced by Lord Young in typical fashion: "The amendments require that the first regulations made under this power-that is, the creation of the first orphan works regulations, the first extended collective licensing regulations and the first exercise of the powers to introduce codes of practice and enforcement provisions for these codes and for the regulation of licensing of orphan works and extended licensing-are subject to the affirmative procedure. That was a long sentence and will need careful reading in Hansard". There was plenty of discussion about licensing and the like. The main gist is this: we want to let these orphaned works be made public, but we don't want legitimate copyright holders to have their work released for free if they don't want it to (especially freelance photographers and the like). Much of the debate was very technical, but it all came back to that basic point. Lord Clement-Jones even had an amendment (283) agreed to.

Lord Clement-Jones was still not 100% convinced, of course, and after Lord Young defined 'orphan works' as "works protected by copyright but for which the copyright owner cannot be identified or traced even after a diligent search", which he called a "succinct definition", Lord Clement-Jones wanted to know if that definition is in the Bill, and if now, should it be? It looks like we'll see at Report.

Clause 42 passed - Amendment 265A, 268A, 277A, 282AZA, 282ZE, 283, 283ZA, 283B, 283C, 284ZA, 284B agreed

After Clause 42, Lord Lucas, in an effort to save time in light of the late hour (and after seven days of Committee), decided that, "unless the Committee objects, I will telescope proceedings by speaking also to all my remaining amendments. I hear no objections: this is good". His first point was 'format shifting': in other words, when you buy a CD, you rip it to MP3 to stick it on your media player of choice. This is a fuzzy area of copyright, but Lord Lucas thinks it should be fine, since everyone does it anyway. Lord Davies of Oldham said it was too complicated to just get a UK solution, so not now.

Schedule 2 : Licensing of copyright and performers' property rights. A big chunk of amendments from the government, but no debate.

Schedule 2 passed - Amendments 299A to 299L agreed

Clause 43 : Increase of penalties relating to infringing articles or illicit recordings had no amendments tabled.

Clause 43 passed - no amendments

Eleventh section, "Public lending right", just Clause 44.

Clause 44 : Public lending right. The final amendment was Amendment 300, a simple probing amendment from Lord Clement-Jones - or, in his words, "it is with enormous pleasure that I rise at 10 minutes before 11 pm to move this final probing amendment in Committee". Lord Young agreed: "finally, unlike in Arthurian legend, we have reached our version of the holy grail - the final amendment". Lord Clement-Jones hoped that "the holy grail we are talking about is not the Monty Python version. That is all I can say at the end of seven days in Committee". If you remember the ending from the Monty Python film, you can see why.

Clause 44 passed - no amendments

Now the twelfth and final section, "General". Clauses 45 to 49. Nothing to see here.

Clause 45 : Power to make consequential provision etc, Clause 46 : Repeals, Schedule 3 : Repeals, Clause 47 : Extent, Clause 48 : Commencement and Clause 49 : Short title had no debate at all, so the final section of the Bill was cleared up almost instantly.

Clauses 45 to 49 & Schedule 3 passed - no amendments

And, that's it for Committee Stage, at last. Phew. It's been a real slog, I must say, but the hard part of this Bill is over with now. We have Report Stage next, which is much shorter than this, I can assure you. I'd better get on with it, though: the Bill's already become an Act, thanks to the upcoming election. Still think it's worth chronicling the debates, though.