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Internet: Online Piracy

My Lords, I applaud the initiative of the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd-Webber, in prompting this debate, and I observe that the House is lucky to have one of the world's great composers in our midst. He made his case powerfully and I shall echo many of his concerns. I declare two relevant interests. I am chairman of EMI's holding company and a director of PayPal (Europe). The new digital technologies have had a radical and transformational impact on almost every individual organisation and sector, from newspapers to retailers, from the betting industry to finance. The music industry in particular has been profoundly affected. Music can be more easily recorded, distributed, discovered and consumed. As a result, more music is listened to than ever before, but less is paid for. We must be honest: the music industry has been slower than most to reinvent itself, both to take advantage of new opportunities for discovering talent and for better serving consumers and businesses, and to adjust and respond to unavoidable new realities. Piracy is certainly, therefore, not the only reason for the music industry's travails over the past decade, but it certainly does matter and it certainly should not be tolerated, for, quite simply, it is theft. Intellectual or creative products available digitally have to be invented, designed, conformed and invested in, just like physical products. Individuals and companies involved in making music are entitled to a fair return for their risk and for their labour. Stealing music in digital form is just as immoral as stealing a CD from Tesco. When high-speed broadband becomes the norm, as the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd-Webber, suggested, it will also be easier and easier to steal high-quality video and film, with potentially severe consequences for the film and television industries more widely. Crime of all kinds in the online world—not just copyright theft—is burgeoning. Child pornography is multiplying; phishing trickery is rife; sophisticated high-tech online fraud is growing; personal computers are infiltrated remotely to steal personal data; and mass attacks are organised on major online entities and governmental bodies. Governments need to bring order to this lawless environment rapidly if serious damage to society and to the economy is to be avoided and if a moral relativism is not to become entrenched. Internet service providers—ISPs—control access to the digital highway for content providers and for consumers alike. ISPs have the technical capability of blocking access to unlawful sites and of detecting illegal activity by consumers and by organised criminal networks. ISPs should be regulated and licensed. I can see why, at the moment, any individual ISP is not volunteering to police the internet. It would be costly, it would deter customers, and there would be few rewards for going first. However, if helping to counter every kind of online crime were an obligation on all ISPs, the cost of compliance would become a price of doing business for all providers and no single ISP would be at a competitive disadvantage. I accept that it would be disproportionate as well as expensive to criminalise all copyright theft by individuals, but we have introduced perfectly effective mechanisms for pursuing people who do not pay their TV licences or who park illegally. An internet regulator could enforce an appropriate regime for tackling online crime and place obligations on ISPs to assist it. Those issues are global but the creative industries in the UK are not just a jewel in our cultural crown but, as the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd-Webber, suggested, a high-performing part of our economy, particularly in London and the south-east, where it is the second sector, after business services, and a vital part of our national wealth-creating capacity and of the tax base for the whole of the UK. It is now time for the Government to be bold and to offer full and proper protection for the music and other content-producing industries in the UK.