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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 85, in the name of my noble friend Lady Miller, who unfortunately cannot be here today. We come back to the fundamental issue that we discussed at Second Reading and in the various quasi-Second Reading speeches that started off this Committee several days ago: how we find the right balance between the belief of the individual that they can access the internet primarily for free against the rights of the copyright owners, who believe that the use of their copyright without penalty constitutes at best theft and at worst something that requires them to receive compensation. There is common ground among all participants in this debate, including Her Majesty's Government, that these provisions are intended to attack only serious infringers; they are not intended to attack somebody who does a one-off download, either in ignorance or for whatever purpose. They are intended only to attack serious infringers. We think that as a matter of policy it should be for Parliament to determine what constitutes a serious infringer rather than, as the Government propose, that it should be left for Ofcom and the code. There are all sorts of technical issues that Ofcom will need to take into account, which cannot be in the Bill—but we see no reason why what is thought to constitute serious copyright infringement in these circumstances cannot be in the Bill. We have suggested that the minimum threshold should be 50 copyright infringement reports; we take that figure from the Explanatory Notes that the Government have circulated with the Bill, where it is suggested that the code will contain a threshold such as 50 reports. If that is the case in the Explanatory Notes, and if the Government have gone that far, we see no reason why at this stage that threshold cannot be put into the Bill. That is the purpose of Amendment 76. My noble friend Lady Miller may not be quite as liberal as my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones and me and has suggested only 10—and I know that she will enjoy reading that statement when she reads Hansard. This is obviously a probing amendment. The principle that we seek to establish is that a number of infringements should be enshrined in the Bill and not in the code. After all, when the code comes back to your Lordships' House for approval, we will be able only to accept or reject it. If we disagree with the definition in the code of a regular infringer, we will have to throw out the whole code because we cannot amend it, which would be daft. It would be much more sensible to put it in the Bill. I beg to move.