Droit de suite at the House of Lords

Later on I shall report in greater detail on the debate in the House of Lords on the Artist's Resale Right Regulation, the draft statutory instrument that will implement the notorious droit de suite directive. As some of our readers may know, the Patent Office and the DTI have managed to ratchet up the already rather harmful directive and this could have been thrown out by the Lords (or the Commons but little is expected of them).

Unfortunately, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, who had ensured there would be a debate by putting down an

"an amendment to the above motion, at end to insert “but this House regrets that the Regulations go beyond the requirements of the European Union Directive implementing the regime for the payment of artists and calls for the Regulations to be replaced within six months by Regulations in accordance with the Directive”.",

in itself rather a mild choice of words, decided not to divide the House. A pity, really. Still, there were some interesting speeches made and huge lacunae in knowledge exposed. The debate will be worth a proper posting.

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