---

Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, has just said. We have to be careful about setting out to criminalise, as he says, a large proportion of our population, particularly when it involves putting them not in the hands of the criminal law with all the safeguards, care and rationality that involves, but in the hands of firms of solicitors who are out to make a buck from the process. None of these people are nice to deal with. Even where the majors have been involved in prosecutions—there are not many cases of that—they are relentless. It is not at all nice to be on the receiving end of one of their prosecutions. They can take a long time, cost a great deal of money and go on, with unspecified consequences, for a period of years. It is not like a parking fine or some simple, reasonable but reasonably painful financial consequence of wrong-doing. This is putting people into the civil justice system with civil levels of proof. We should be careful about doing that and the circumstances in which we do it. ACS Law, one of the firms involved in this, has been kind enough to write to me. Its technique is to send out letters saying that it has evidence that a breach of copyright has been committed and demanding a few hundred pounds in recompense. The difficulty is that the evidence has usually been provided by a company abroad that does not disclose the methods by which it has been obtained. It may well have been obtained against data protection rules—that is certainly the conclusion that the Swiss and French authorities seem to have reached. It is anyway totally impenetrable. You receive one of these things saying that you have done wrong and owe money. How on earth do you disprove it? Without spending a great deal of time and money, you have no means of showing this company that you do not owe them what they say. I think most of their income comes from people who just pay. I am not aware that there have been many court cases at the end of this because of the element of bluff. This seems a disreputable thing to wish upon our citizens. We should be careful in this Bill that we are not going to multiply what is going on at the moment. If we can, we ought to seek to avoid that. We ought to produce something civilised, aimed—as is much of the first bit of Clauses 4 to 17—at education and persuasion, and where at the end of the day there is due process and reasonableness in the consequences for our citizens. I have a great deal of sympathy for this amendment. However, it perhaps should not be the right to prosecute that we try to remove, but the right to obtain information about who has been doing wrong; in other words, the right to users’ names and addresses. Since that process is so wound up in what the Government are proposing, perhaps we ought to make that exclusive so that in order to obtain it, copyright owners have to go through the processes in the Bill. It will be difficult to get this balancing act right, and I do not pretend that I have an instant answer to this but, returning to what the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, said, we should be very careful about what we are doing to our citizens, because these are not nice people to fall foul of. The methods that they use to extract money are not nice, and I do not mean just the fringe operators. That applies to dealing with a difficult-to-refute allegation in the civil justice system. What the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, proposes in the amendment seems to have a pretty good basis.