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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, perhaps I may remind your Lordships of the interests I declared during the Second Reading debate. I well recognise, as will everyone here, the perception so eloquently outlined by the noble Lords, Lord Razzall, Lord Mitchell, and others, but perhaps I may say respectfully that while this House may understand it, it should not condone for a moment that perception. Because much of the content on the internet is free, it does not follow that all the content should be free. The theft of an electronic good has an exact moral equivalence with the theft of a physical good. No one in the House would condone the theft of a CD, a DVD or a newspaper from a stall. We simply have to end a perception that is at the heart of the difficulties increasingly faced by the creative industries. This is not a threat of the future, but one of the present and the recent past. There is no major creative industry, either in this country or in other places, that has not been massively and adversely affected by the scale of this theft. I remind your Lordships that the best evidence we have shows that something like half of all internet activity is tied up with copyright theft. We are not talking about some minor problem, but a massive threat not just to any industry, but to one that is a critical part of our national cultural life and, although people always find it hard to believe, one of massive economic importance. In this city alone the creative industries taken as a whole are bigger than the financial services industry. So copyright theft has enormous economic and cultural implications, and let us not dodge the issue that it matters that large numbers of young people think that such theft is okay. They should not think that, and this legislation offers a proportionate framework for dealing with it. Questions have been asked about the technology. It is not all that complicated. The only person who is going to be captured by this legislation is someone who freely offers on the internet at an identified moment in time—we know exactly where they are coming from, so to speak—material that it is unlawful to provide. They are not sent to jail the next day, but go through a long, complex and well-considered process, at the end of which the main sanction is that they are cut off from the internet. That is a proportionate response to a massive problem.