Involving sixth form students from two schools experienced in the Academy of Ideas and Pfizer Debating Matters Competition, the debate will showcase its innovative format with a debate on the role of copyright law.

300 years since the Statute of Anne first enshrined copyright as a concept in UK law, the development of the internet has sharpened the debate on the value of intellectual property. None more so in the field of the arts, where Picasso’s maxim ‘Great artists steal’ has been plagiarised by more than one artist down the years.

In July 2009 Amazon sparked uproar when it remotely deleted thousands of sold copies of 1984 from its users’ new Kindle e-book, on the basis it violated the book’s copyright. JK Rowling and Damien Hirst have both recently come under fire as for suing other artists for plagiarising or mocking their ideas. The Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) argue that such wealthy artists are the exception, and that small royalty payments are often the only way for struggling artists to support themselves.

This year Lord Carter’s long-awaited Digital Britain report has proposed rigorous laws to fight online piracy. It follows shortly after the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property which argued that copyright is needed to ‘incentivise’ creativity. But with more and more artists giving their work away for free online under agreements such as Creative Commons, is this necessarily true? Do we need to defend copyright to allow artists the freedom to flourish, or condemn it for limiting their creativity

FOR: Kings Norton Girls’ School, Birmingham. Teacher: Helen Rickard

AGAINST: Woodhouse College, London. Teacher: Margery Gretton

Cory Doctorow (novelist; co-editor, boingboing.net; author, Content: selected essays on technology, creativity, copyright and the future of the future)

Marcus Lanyon (artist, writer and musician; finalist, Saatchi Gallery & Channel 4’s 4 New Sensations)

Sandy Starr (communications officer, Progress Educational Trust)