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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, this is a useful amendment from the point of view of discussing the issue. I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Maxton, that the proposed new clause would not be satisfactory in its current form, but were the Government to think along these lines, which I could envisage them quite easily doing, particularly when they get around to trying to amend the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act under Clause 17, there are certain points to take into consideration before we start blocking access to websites. These points have arisen elsewhere, because action is taken against websites used for the purpose of phishing; in other words, trying to get to your security details in order to misuse them. Very often, part of a perfectly good website is hijacked. Several government websites are known to have hosted phishing pages because people have hacked in and popped their own thing into a sub-page on the government site. It can happen to anyone’s website: various large commercial organisations have had it. When the blocking occurs, you cannot block to a sub-page level; you would end up blocking the whole website. You might suddenly find the DWP website, for example, being knocked out, which would be quite interesting. From that point of view, therefore, the website owner must be warned before such action takes place. Some precautions need to be taken. The Bill does not distinguish between any forms of copyright; it applies to all copyright, including written copyright. It is mostly music, film and games software that we have been talking about, but the provisions could be used equally well against any written copyright infringement. We should be very careful that we do not inadvertently put in the Bill—we should probably bear it in mind as we look at other clauses—something which someone could use to their own gain in order to try to inhibit someone else’s ability to do business because of written copyright issues. I should think that a lot of websites abuse written copyright in some way or another. A website that everyone knows has copyright infringements all over it is YouTube, which fulfils a huge public function and should not be removed. However, a clause such as this might be used to close down something like that, which would not be in the public interest. The amendment therefore raises a lot of useful considerations in case the Government decide to go down this route.