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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support the principle of the amendment. It is much safer to do this at a parliamentary level, where we can take into account larger considerations, than having some official put under a lot of pressure behind the scenes to adopt a harsher or less harsh regime as time goes on. Under the amendment, you could have a less harsh regime, which is fine. In deciding on a number, we have to remember that a subscriber does not mean one end-user; a subscriber could have four, five or six children or a flat full of 10 students—it could be anything. So 50 downloads could be five downloads over 10 people, which is not very much. It hardly hits the music industry very hard at all. In fact, it is considerably less than people used to put on to Phillips cassettes when they taped Radio Luxembourg and other radio shows a long time ago, which did not bankrupt the industry. So we should set it at a level that avoids having thousands of letters flying around the place and which shows that we are chasing only the serious ones, not the casual person who infringes only occasionally.