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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I want to make a quick comment. Rather than leaving it till later, this is the moment when I probably should raise the point about who the subscriber is, which is what we are starting to discuss. Another example is Parliament. I am not sure who signs the parliamentary contract, but presumably it is the subscriber. If, like me, many noble Lords have a home connection which is paid for by Parliament, presumably though they are the end user, they are not the subscriber: the contract is actually between PICT and Demon. As I have discovered when trying to get information as to why my internet is not working, you have to go through the very tortuous procedure of ringing up PICT, which then rings up Demon, which then tries to get hold of BT Wholesale, which says that it is not responsible and will only deal with someone else. It then talks to Openreach— PICT is not allowed to talk to Openreach because it has to go through Demon, which has the contract. It all runs on, and no one takes responsibility for the fault. If anything can be done in this Bill to put a single responsibility on one single body so that these Chinese walls that we have artificially erected between the different parts of the BT group cannot be used, it might go a long way to getting decent internet access sorted out for people, so that you can actually get wholesale to talk to retail, et cetera. That is not quite a red herring. The point really is: who is the subscriber? When some noble Lord’s child, or maybe not even a child, a friend, downloads music or something like that, or, as we have just heard, downloads some text which was in copyright—though let us leave that out for the moment—in their home, over the connection provided by Parliament, is Parliament going to be prosecuted? Does the whole parliamentary system then get suspended, if sufficient noble Lords do this? It is an interesting thought. We have to be very careful about what on earth the description of subscriber is, and the Government should be looking at that. Secondly, on the legal definition of "allowed", the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is right. I would like to hear from the Minister—following advice from his legal advisers—a precise definition of "allowed". We hit this problem in the Computer Misuse Act with the definition of the word "likely" which, we were told authoritatively by the Government’s lawyers, meant "more likely than not". That is why it was not written into the Bill. For me and for most people that is not common usage. In common usage the word "allowed" would mean that I had given positive approval to an action. However, I am not sure that that is the legal definition. It may be that "failure to prevent" is the legal definition. If we do not accept one of these amendments, or the definition of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, with authority, I would like by the next stage of the Bill to have a proper legal definition of "allowed".