Vince Cable, the business secretary, will on Wednesday give cabinet-level support to a report calling for a wide-ranging overhaul of the UK's intellectual property and copyright laws.

The minister is expected to endorse the major recommendations of Professor Ian Hargreaves's review into copyright, which is due to be published on Wednesday, in a speech to be delivered at a conference run by the Alliance Against IP Theft.

Hargreaves's report is expected to call for a loosening and simplification of some aspects of copyright law, a view held by Cable who is will say that the current system has failed to "keep pace" with the fast-moving digital economy.

Cable is set to highlight such out of date restrictions as "obstacles to important research, innovation and growth" for British businesses and entrepreneurs as well as "impinging" on the day-to-day lives of consumers.

The minister is expected to say that "one of Hargreaves's great contributions has been to show the importance of copyright in less obvious contexts. He describes how academic work on malaria – which seeks to draw on previous research through a process known as data mining – is being stymied by copyright and contract restrictions."

The review will call on ministers to look at initiatives such as creating a "one-stop shop" body to make it easier to get clearance for the use of copyrighted content. The new body, to be run by rights holders, aims to long-running issue of rights around "orphan works" – where the original musicians, writers, heirs or other copyright owners cannot be traced.

Significant amounts of archive material held by organisations including the BBC and the British Film Institute that have not been exploited by the industry because there have been issues over who some of the IP rights holders might be. The problem, Cable will observe, is that "one unknown author can effectively hold the interests of the others to ransom".

Other recommendations aim to clear up anachronistic regulations, such as the commonplace practice of downloading a CD on to an MP3 player, called "format-shifting", which is technically illegal. In response to that proposal, Cable will highlight problems with the existing rules.

The business secretary is expected to say that "the consequence of the ban on format-shifting [copying CDs on to a computer or MP3 player] is simply to make it harder for a British entrepreneur to compete with technology developed in the US and other countries where there's no such ban."

A hot topic of debate among rights holders has been whether Hargreaves will call for the adoption of US-style "fair use" rules, which companies such as Google have exploited to build its YouTube business without fear of prosecution for using copyrighted content. It is understood that the Hargreaves review will reject the proposal to introduce such a system to UK law.

The report will also argue that intellectual property laws around parody, which are considerably more stringent than in countries such as the US, be relaxed to allow comedians, broadcasters and other content creators more creative scope – ensuring that take-offs such as the YouTube hit Newport State of Mind are no longer removed.