For a man engaged in the political equivalent of herding cats, David Lammy seems in a remarkably good mood. As intellectual property minister, the former lawyer - and friend of fellow Harvard alumnus Barack Obama - is charged with the Herculean task of dragging the UK's copyright rules into the digital age.
Alongside communications minister Lord Carter, meanwhile, he is trying to thrash out a deal between film, music, publishing and internet companies to prevent the creative industries, which the government hopes will help pull the UK out of recession, being washed away by the flood of illegal online file-sharing.
It has not been smooth going. Earlier this year the government's own consultation into ways of defeating internet piracy failed to find any consensus whatever. More recently, the rather Aunt Sally-ish provisional proposal that Lammy and Carter concocted for a rights agency as part of the Digital Britain programme has been torched by media owners and internet service providers (ISPs) alike.
The media companies are clamouring for legal action, having scented blood with the successful outcome of the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden, while the ISPs are fighting against any attempt to make them liable for what their customers do online. The only thing people seem to agree on is that there is a problem: one in four British internet users has illegally downloaded material, and more do so every day.
But sitting in his Westminster office, the youngest member of government is undeterred. "I am not sure there has ever been consensus since 1709 [when the Statute of Anne first gave authors the rights to their works] in the family that is copyright," he says, "but there have been critical moments in that long history: the birth of the printing press, difference in perception between us in Europe and our US colleagues over book copyright... even the advent of analogue TV brought certain hurdles. But what we have seen in the past three or four years is a massive acceleration in the need to deal with this different frontier. What we are keen to do in the UK is to establish a more shared view on the importance of copyright to our creative and economic future."
The current critical moment has come about because the internet has taken control of distribution out of the hands of the media companies and into the lap of consumers, Lammy says. "I think history will say this past three or four years has seen the most extraordinary acceleration in the way technology has caught the key parts of the creative economy unawares. Clearly the growth of the internet has provided the means to distribute in a completely different way, and it is that which changes the basis for the copyright discussion."
A weaker minister would have buckled under the intense lobbying of the massive multinational rights holders, but Lammy has made it his job to listen to those who do not have multimillion-pound budgets with which to push their agendas: the people who listen to music or watch films and television.
The attention to real people's views is characteristic of the man, who has been tipped by some in Westminster as a possible future prime minister. He is open and engaging: when he pronounces "north London" as "norf London", it is not in a desperate attempt to seem a man of the people but genuine; that is where he grew up, in a single-parent household after his father left when he was 11. Having been selected as a Labour candidate for the Greater London Authority, in 2000 he succeeded Bernie Grant as MP for Tottenham and retained the seat in a byelection.
Lammy certainly has powerful friends. He won a choral scholarship to the King's School in Peterborough, then studied at London's School of Oriental and African Studies before spending a year at Harvard Law School. Returning four years ago for a black alumni event, he struck up a friendship with a young US senator, Barack Obama. "We continue to have a relationship," Lammy says.
Lammy is faultlessly "on-message", perhaps having learned from gaffes early in his career that fuelled whispers he had been over-promoted. He seems to have mastered the complexities of the intellectual property elements of the brief he received last October (he is also minister of state for higher education).
"Consumers today are saying, 'We want access to content at a time we want it'," he says. "They are saying they would like to move things around the different bits of technology they own and share it with friends and family. They are saying, 'We want to participate because technology gives us the means to do that. We want to cut and splice and come up with new creative pieces of work'."
But he is not advocating a free-for-all - "I can safely say that I have never illegally downloaded in my life" - because he has talked to creators of content such as Billy Bragg's Featured Artists Coalition, and believes that "without the creator there is nothing to talk about".
The demands of the online audience, however, "introduce some big issues about licensing and how consumers do that legally in terms of the rights they need. It would be wrong to suggest that copyright has been largely something in our history that has been in the public domain.
"Copyright has largely been the domain of lawyers and of creatives, or professionals like teachers. We are moving into an environment where so many people have to be aware of being on the right side of the law, but at the moment accessing those rights is not a straightforward process for the consumer."
This is where the proposed Rights Agency comes in. Consumers have to be given legitimate ways of using and repurposing content, and only through the creation of compelling services can the future of content be secured. It is no surprise that Lammy is a fan of Spotify, the online music service that recently clinched a deal with music rights organisation, PRS.
The Rights Agency will be backed up by legislation, but Lammy - like Lord Carter - does not want to have to codify every aspect of online intellectual property, not least because such legislation would quickly go out of date. He wants the rights holders, content creators and online industry to reach a solution together. The agency will "facilitate proper working together", he says. "In the end, the solutions are going to be commercial solutions. They are going to be solutions that are about ensuring people pay for content, but the ease of paying is there."
Other countries are looking at more aggressive approaches, but with limited success. French legislators recently voted against a new internet piracy bill that would have resulted in the forced disconnection of persistent illegal file-sharers under a "three strikes" regime. "It is for the French to determine what is right for them, but for us here we do not believe that would be the right road to go down," Lammy emphasises.
But the Rights Agency should provide a framework in which the media industry and ISPs can decide under what circumstances internet users should be monitored. In its drive to reduce illegal file sharing by 70%-80%, the government has already thrashed out a deal between the two sides under which persistent illegal file-sharers receive letters warning them that their actions could result in legal proceedings. Any legislation to come out of the final Digital Britain report, which will be published by July, is expected to codify this system.
Alongside this work, culture secretary Andy Burnham is trying to pull together an international consensus on intellectual property ahead of an industry gathering in October in Hertfordshire, which has been styled "a Davos for the creative industries" after the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Switzerland. The recent budget, meanwhile, included a commitment from the Treasury to look at the taxation of intellectual property to ensure the UK can continue to attract research and development investment.
"My view is that intellectual property may have been in the past a technical legal issue important to the economy but slightly in the backwaters," Lammy says. "It is not going to be that in future. If Britain is to be the knowledge economy that it absolutely has to be in the 21st century, then intellectual property will be centre-stage."
The CV
Name David Lammy
Title Minister for intellectual property and higher education in the innovation, universities and skills department
Age 36
Education King's School, Peterborough; School for Oriental and African Studies, London University; Harvard Law School
Career Lawyer; MP for Tottenham since 2000; junior ministerial posts in the health and constitutional affairs departments; culture minister; skills minister; took up current roles in October 2008
Family Married, with two children
Interests Tottenham Hotspur football club, charity (patron of boys2MEN and Peace Alliance), campaigner for ovarian cancer research after his mother died from it last year