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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, to come back to the question of figures, I really do not think the Government can get away with starting this great moral panic about the state of our creative industries and then, when relevant figures are quoted, say that there is no basis for them. There either is a basis for this whole legislation and the worry the Government have or there is not. The figure that has been adduced, other than that relating to 7,000 users, is that the Swedish use of the internet dropped by half when they introduced these provisions. If anything like that is true of this country, we are talking about a very large scale of illegal behaviour. I entirely agree with the noble Lord that these amendments are not appropriate because I was thinking in terms of downloading. Actually, what we are talking about in terms of enforcement is making material available for uploading. Somebody who signs on to one of these peer-to-peer networks and downloads one tune thereby makes the whole of their library available—1,000, maybe—and along comes some copywriter and his organisation and zips each of those, and then he has 1,000 reports against his name. So it is not the level of activity that we are measuring, it is the number of tunes, or other property, which have been made available on a peer-to-peer network. That makes it very difficult to think of a valid threshold in terms of a number because we are not talking about level of activity, we are just talking about the passive side of it—the making available of copyright material for download. How this whole concept of threshold is addressed will be crucial.