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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, the purpose of these amendments is to add the value of the infringement to the description in the copyright infringement report. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, suggested, the amendment is probing. On the face of it, the amendment would require something like 79p to be inserted for music—for those who are not familiar with this genre, this is the cost of an iTunes download—which would highlight the small amount that is apparently being forfeited by the copyright owner. While an apparently simple amendment, this would be impractical as things are just not that simple. The infringement that the copyright owner detects and puts into the copyright infringement report is material that has been uploaded and offered for downloading. That material may have been downloaded thousands of times; it is not possible to say for sure. In that case, what value should the copyright owner place on the infringement? It makes little sense to put in a range of anything from 79p to £7,900, but that might be the only accurate way of doing it. Nor is it sensible to use a simple multiplier of 10 for unreleased material, which underlines the practical difficulty of placing a monetary value on the infringement. Someone who places an unreleased blockbuster film or game on a file-sharing website for the world to download could cause huge economic damage. To the extent that it may fall under criminal rather than civil damage, is it sensible to assign that a value of £50? It is also worth reminding ourselves that copyright does not only allow investment; it also gives the creator control over what happens to their creation. We might wish to have the works of the Beatles available for download, but, since they choose not to license that use, should we assign that work a zero value, as the noble Lord proposes? Since the value system proposed by the noble Lord is not reasonable or practical, it follows that it should not be used for setting a threshold, as this would be an arbitrary figure arrived at through a flawed process for assessing the real cost of the infringement. It is perhaps worth restating at this point why we are making these provisions. Indeed, it has much to do with the cost of infringement to the creative economy. Noble Lords may be aware of some of the figures used in our impact assessment that was carried out last year: a cost of £290 million to £500 million over 10 years, but with increased revenues over the same period. Some might question the robustness of that analysis, and I do not pretend that firm figures from independent sources are thick on the ground, but it certainly shows the scale of the opportunity. Furthermore, there is the unquantifiable but serious issue of the corrosive effect of widespread unlawful activity carrying on unchecked. It cannot be healthy for a significant proportion of our population to think that it is acceptable to satisfy their demand for content by ripping off others, including the artists. Protecting their intellectual property is primarily the responsibility of copyright owners themselves, but as a country we need to guard against unlawful behaviour becoming accepted as the norm. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, talked about the threshold. We absolutely accept that the concept of a threshold is important, and the Bill allows for it. Our approach to the threshold is that it should be for the code, but I recognise that this is not a sufficient answer. Let me say that we would expect the threshold to be based on the number of CIRs received over a period of time. The details should be left to the code. I accept that we must develop the concept of a threshold. We make allowances for it in the Bill and we will put flesh on to the bones in the code. I concur with the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, that the subscriber is the focus. He is right in that respect. What can I say to the noble Earl, Lord Erroll? It does not matter how many times we say that this is a graduated response. It is not a heavyweight response or a crackdown. We are not talking about half a million users being disconnected from the internet. I ask only that we should have a proportionate debate. The measures that we are proposing are reasonable, proportionate and about changing culture and behaviour. It does not help us to have a proportionate debate, if he does not mind my saying so, if we keep exaggerating the figures.