---

Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 52, I shall speak to the other amendments in this group. We come to the question of the threshold: how big a transgression is required before the subscriber can be thrown to the wolves? My objective is twofold. One is to not have the Government pay too much attention to the exact drafting. They are not paying attention to anything at the moment; I will wait a moment. My first objective is to not have the Government pay attention to the exact drafting of any of these amendments. I am merely trying to flesh things out to see where the logic leads and what sort of provisions we might need. The concept of the threshold is important and we ought to take the opportunity in the Bill to say what we mean by it, rather than just leaving it as something which is mentioned at one point in the Bill and never returned to again. As has already been pointed out, we will start this operation with millions of our own citizens being active transgressors. So, we are going to have to go through a process of education. Certainly to start with, and I hope to continue with, we are aiming at those who are causing a significant amount of damage. Those who are occasional transgressors are not going to find themselves picked up, because that level of misbehaviour is not doing any great damage to the industry and that level of enforcement would do a great deal of damage to polity. That is the position that I hope the Government are setting out to achieve. If we are going to have a threshold, we have to define that threshold in terms of something. It seems to me that has to be value. One film, one music track and some large piece of software do not add up to three, if you see what I mean. These things have different values, and the only reasonable way of summing up the damage that has been done to copyright owners is to look at the value. It is perhaps not the most convenient way of doing it, but if the Government have a different way of describing the threshold I would very much like to hear what it is. The second aspect, which comes through in Amendment 110, is that we should be looking at a proper sequence of events. Once the subscriber has been notified that they are suspected of having infringed, and have had the time to go through an appeal process—if they choose to avail themselves of it—only then should the clock start on the second infringement. The second infringement has to date from after that process in order for it to qualify them for their details being given to the copyright owners. In other words, you cannot do what one of my friends did, which is to travel from Edinburgh to Inverness tripping four speed cameras and lose one’s licence on cumulative points. You have to be given notice and go through the process of education before you get onto the process of punishment. Those are the points I am trying to make in these amendments. I hope to draw out of the Government how they see the process of threshold working; what it will feel like for a subscriber; and how their points will be totted up. Doubtless we will come back to this at another stage. I beg to move.