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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, it is very important that the Government should flesh out their ideas of how threshold will work before the Bill leaves this House so that we can begin to understand how the Government see this being enforced and so that we may have a proper care for and understanding of what we are letting our citizens in for. The whole concept of threshold will be difficult to get right. I should be very grateful if the noble Lord could confirm that we will have more evidence of the Government’s thinking and direction, even if we are given nothing final, before the Bill leaves the House so that we can get our heads round that, because 7 million people is an entirely believable number. Whatever process we set out in the Bill must reduce that number by an enormous degree before we let the lawyers for the copyright owners loose on them in a big way. As I say, being subject to the BPI’s lawyers, let alone some of the fringe operators, is an extremely unpleasant business when defending yourself against something which is not an ordinary act. If my neighbour says, "You kicked my dog", that is something which you can comprehend. You did or did not do that and other people might have seen it. But if you are told that something has happened on your network—people use machines, they do not understand how they work—you have no particular concept of how to get at that, how to control it, who might have done it or what might have happened. It is very difficult to defend yourself. You are dealing with potentially very large demands, as the noble Lord said. In America, where the industry has gone after people, it has gone after them for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The noble Lord has said it himself: what is the value of putting a thousand tunes on the net? It could be that a lot of damage has been caused. The industry cannot present any evidence as to how often these things have been downloaded by other people. We could get into the American scenario where people who put 1,000 tunes on the net are being gone after for $1,000 each. Unless we get a sense of proportion and understanding into this, that what we are trying to do is educate the public and go after the determined and worst offenders, we are in real trouble as regards the consequences that this will have for people by just allowing an industry to delude itself that treating customers in this way is the way forward. So if the Government do not have figures that are better than ours, they must get some and give us an idea of how many people they think will fall foul of this and how we are to ensure that the overall effect of the Bill is effective for the industry and proportionate as far as our citizens are concerned. However, I entirely accept that these amendments will not do. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 52 withdrawn. Amendment 53 not moved. Amendment 54 Moved by