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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, perhaps I may say briefly that this is a problem and I accept, even as a Scotsman, that the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, has a point about sports rights. However, looking into the future, you wonder how accurate it will be. I wonder whether Manchester United, with a fan base right around the world, is going to put up with being limited just to the rights sold by the Premier League when it could probably sell its own product for a higher price or get more money from it. But that is another matter. The fact is that the music industry and the audio side have attempted to deal with the problem in ways that are not legally prescriptive. It has tried to do it by micro payment, which means that you pay only a small sum for the piece of music you want, not for a whole CD, while performers are now beginning to sell their product straight on to the internet to be purchased by youngsters. That may encourage them to go out and buy the CD. Further, I gather that increasingly in the pop music area of the music industry—I am not a great pop fan myself—performers now make their money not from selling records of any sort, but by going out and performing live to the public. So the music industry has realised that the solicitors’ letters sent to some people have not been a major deterrent. It may be that the video industry now has to look at this in the same way and see whether there are other ways in which it can tackle this issue. We can accept that this is a problem and that we may have to look at ways in which we stop it, but surely the industries themselves have got see how they can deal with it.