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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I know that I pointed this out under the previous amendment but, looking at it and thinking more about what people have said, I think that part of it applies to this amendment as well. ""Access to, or use of, services and applications through electronic communications networks shall respect the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons"." It goes on to say that they can only be imposed, ""if they are appropriate, proportionate and necessary within a democratic society, and their implementation shall be subject to adequate procedural safeguards"." And it finishes up: ""The right to an effective and timely judicial review shall be guaranteed"." If we do not comply with that in the Bill, we will be in breach of our commitments to Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights. The Minister’s certificate on the front of the Bill may actually be misleading. I would like to see something like this in the Bill, as I think that it is essential. It can also be used to cover some of the issues around proportionality in Amendment 33. Was it proportional even to use the civil law in the way that it was used? The noble Lord, Lord Birt, represents that all this creativity will disappear if we do not have this provision. Actually, the Bill protects the back catalogue of six or so large digital rights companies. On the whole, the small people will not be protected by patent law because they cannot afford it. There will be no one on the internet looking for their songs being downloaded and no one interested in pursuing those cases. The small people are already putting their stuff out through other methods. The other day, I looked at Pledge Music, for instance. It is a rather clever idea for people to pledge money for some of the stuff that has been produced. It has been shown that a lot of the people who do this downloading also spend a lot of money on other products associated with it, so the concept that these people are losing all their money because there is downloading going on is not necessarily true. This is slightly, but not entirely, off the point. I remember back to when the music industry said it was going to be wiped out by the Philips cassette. Exactly the same thing went on. It tried to crack down on people caught with Philips cassette recorders and ban the production of machines with two cassette decks which were clearly for copying cassettes. Did it make any difference? At the end of the day, no. "Avatar" is an interesting example. Has it suffered as a result of the fact that 300,000 copies have been made? Would people have gone to the cinema anyway? Perhaps they will go to watch it in full 3D glory, having sampled it on an inadequate little screen. These things may have benefits. The proportionality of this is important. I am afraid that that is what we are losing sight of by trying to pretend that the whole creative industry will collapse without protection. We need something that will protect the human rights of the ordinary citizen in a proportionate way. That is in the new framework directive and we need also to put it in the Bill.