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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. The point I am trying to make is that the person living in the house can get blamed for what the chap in your example did while sitting in his motor car. It may not be the subscriber who has infringed or even allowed a copyright infringement. The Government need to clarify how they will try to tackle this problem. I can understand the thinking behind targeting the measures at an internet service subscriber but there must be some process of recognition at least that copyright infringement may have taken place using a subscriber’s internet account without their knowledge. Amendment 53 is designed to probe what sort of evidence will be available to indicate whether the infringement was by the subscriber or not. As I understand it, there is no way to tell, so a legitimate subscriber is open to penalties for something that was entirely unrelated to him. Of course, the subscriber has some responsibility not knowingly to allow file-sharing on his account, but there will be many cases where he has no way of knowing or preventing the hijacking of his account, as my noble friend Lord Lucas has pointed out. There is an example of this which might be of interest to the Bench opposite. There is a railway line on which you can plug in and get an internet connection. At the moment, the ultimate person there is the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who described himself the other day as the Thin Controller. I would hate this to be another example of the Government not listening to the Opposition when making legislation and ending up with one of their Ministers falling foul. I hope the Minister can clarify the Government’s current thinking on this problem as the Bill does not seem to deal with it.