Philip Pullman and Kate Mosse among writers warning that changes being considered could flood UK with cheap foreign editions and threaten livelihoods
Bestselling writers including Philip Pullman and Kate Mosse are warning of a “potentially devastating” change to the UK’s copyright laws that could damage authors’ livelihoods by flooding the UK market with cheap foreign editions.
The Intellectual Property Office launched a consultation this week into the UK’s approach to copyright in the wake of Brexit. One option under consideration would see a change to the “copyright exhaustion” rule, which governs when the control of a rights holder over the distribution of their property expires. For example, if a customer buys a book, then the owner of the book’s copyright would not then be able to prevent the customer selling that book to another person in the same territory.
