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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, like the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, I may be in danger of saying something that applies to other amendments as well, but since this is the very beginning of the debate on file-sharing, perhaps I may make my points now and return to them later. One of the things that I do is go round schools and talk to young children about general business ethics. We talk about all sorts of things that people should and should not do in the business workplace. When we come to summing-up time, I always ask how many of them steal—I do not ask them to raise their hands; I just ask them to talk on the subject of stealing. Of course, they all say that they do not steal. We then come on to illegal file-sharing and downloading of music, movies and so on, which, of course, every single child in this country is doing—you would be hard pressed to find any person under the age of 25 who is not illegally downloading. We should face up to that issue. We will talk today about legislation that will preclude this, and fines and all sorts of people becoming involved. There is a huge danger here. A huge group of our people are doing something that they do not think is wrong or a crime. It is dangerous for us to be putting into effect legislation that puts a whole lot of people in a criminal situation when they do not think that they are committing a crime. One interesting thing: this is the time when people are voting on the movies that are going to win BAFTA awards and the Oscars in America. I know for a fact that some of the films on which voting has occurred have already been uploaded to the internet and are being downloaded. There is no question that this is a tremendous problem. To young people, the big film and music companies are often seen as the enemy, as bodies which have charged exorbitant prices for their products over time, so there is no sense of guilt about downloading. This is something we should think about in our deliberations this evening.