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Mike Weatherley stands down as IP Advisor to the PM
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 13 October 2014
Following the publication of that there copyright education report last week, Mike Weatherley MP has announced he is stepping down from his role as Intellectual Property Advisor to David Cameron after a year in the job. As a Tory MP, he’s presumably quitting to go and advise Nigel Farage on IP matters.
No, not really. Weatherley had already announced he would step down as MP for the Brighton constituency of Hove and Portslade at the next election, and he seems to think that with the third of his reports now done he has sufficiently informed the parliamentary debate on all matters copyright. The other reports looked at the ‘follow the money’ approach to tackling online infringement and at the search engines’ role in combating piracy.
He may also reckon that, with the recent party conferences kicking the Westminster village very much into electioneering mode ahead of next year’s big vote – and with the UKIP agenda likely to dominate much of that – there’s little point trying to engage political types in any sort of debate on IP issues. Let’s just hope whoever forms government in May 2015 remembers to return to his proposals from this last year; the fact that his reports generally enjoyed cross-party support should help in that regard.
Confirming he was now stepping down from his IP Advisor role, Weatherley said: “It has been a wonderful opportunity to work with the Prime Minister in this way. Feedback from industry has been very encouraging throughout the time that I served as the Prime Minister’s adviser and I have very much enjoyed the work that was involved in both tackling IP crime and boosting the profile of IP generally”.
