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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, not for the first time, Clause 4 has proved difficult to get rid of and I am glad that we have gone past that and on to an amendment which I hope the Minister will not take too literally. The amendment seeks to tackle the general question of how, under the regime proposed by the Government, or some extension of it, we are to deal with infringement by means of websites. This has two aspects, one of which was referred to gently at Second Reading. That aspect is the evolution of infringement from peer to peer to using cyberlockers, I think they are called. There was also the impromptu speech of the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, a couple of days ago on the problems faced by football authorities, which is largely a question of a streaming video from identifiable sites. These are not really tackled by the peer-to-peer clauses as they are at the moment and the amendment proposes a means of dealing with identified websites. From what the Government have said, they need something like this to deal with the peer-to-peer problem. Subscribers, particularly those who have wireless networks or other networks to which adults other than themselves have access, will need some method, through their routers or whatever other kit they are using, of blocking access to peer-to-peer networks. Otherwise, as the responsible person under the Bill, there will be nothing they can do to prevent other people on the network infringing copyright and there will be nothing they can do to discover whether those other people have infringed copyright because there is nothing in the Bill which gives the copyright owner or the subscriber the necessary rights of access to the other computers on the network. Unless we give the subscriber power to deal with illegal file sharing, he will be between a rock and a hard place. He will be prosecuted because file sharing has taken place via his network and he will have no powers to deal with that fact other than to cease his internet connection or not allow other people onto it. We have to live in the real world. People need to operate via networks and shared access. We have to live with that and provide a way for copyright to survive in that environment rather than pretending that we can shift the whole electronic environment of the country merely to appease the music industry. It is not that important. The music industry has to move with the times; the times do not have to stand still for the music industry. We need a way of enabling individuals to block access to offending sites. Clearly an IP provider cannot decide which sites should be blocked; it has no resources to make such investigations. I suspect that the Government would not wish to publish a list of sites which are to be blocked, and so it comes down to the industry. Many of us have our e-mails blocked from time to time when we find ourselves on people’s blacklists, although the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, has always behaved himself. I find myself on blacklists quite frequently. I write nice letters to whoever it is who has put me on them and a day or two later I am off. It is an accepted feature of the internet having to protect itself that you will find yourself in that kind of trouble from time to time and, as long as there are efficient appeal mechanisms, you will get off. Someone will have to run a black list, as it were—a list of peer-to-peer sites and a list of sites known to be involved with copyright infringement in other ways—so that individuals who wish to protect themselves against actions under the Bill are able to do so. The amendment proposes one way in which such a list might be compiled. It requires evidence to be produced in front of a court and is a relatively formal way of doing things. It may be that an informal way is best but we need to address the problem somehow. I beg to move.