James Mackenzie, commercial director of Cutbot, told Out-Law.com that businesses and internet users could both suffer if the Government waits for the courts to interpret whether the act of browsing lawfully published web pages or circulating links to those pages is legitimate.

“If Parliament fails to act, Ministers risk seeing the innocent browsing of the web criminalised and legitimate UK businesses being stifled,” Mackenzie said.

Last week Business Minister Norman Lamb said the Government would not draft new copyright laws to make the act of website browsing explicitly legitimate and not in breach of copyright until the courts had ruled on the issue.

In a House of Commons committee session Labour MP Fiona O’Donnell had proposed that amendments should be made to UK copyright law to explicitly enable internet users to make “any circulation” of a web address, its title, or “of another web address that redirects to that web address” where copyrighted material has been published at the permission of rights holders without those acts infringing copyright.

The act of downloading data required to view that copyright material “and any subsequent processing of that data, including processing for display, provided that it does not result in any publication elsewhere of the work or an adaptation of the work” should also be explicitly permissible, O’Donnell’s draft amendment had proposed.

O’Donnell challenged the Government to “render innocent acts legal, including the 1.3 million articles that British web users post to Twitter or Facebook each month” and explicitly create a web browsing exception into UK copyright law. She said doing so would bring UK law up to date and “realign” it with “European legislation.”

continues at Government should legislate on web browsing copyright issue, says media monitoring firm.