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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am afraid that I disagree with this amendment. The whole point at this stage is that the subscriber should not be identified. It is the Norwich Pharmacal order from the court that enables the subscriber to be identified. It is at that point—going back, again, to the ISP—that the ISP can reveal information that enables the subscriber to be identified. As I understand the Bill, at this point the purpose of the list is purely to enable the rights holder to realise that someone is breaching copyright, and breaching it sufficiently often that they want to proceed and take the trouble of taking out a Norwich Pharmacal order. If we do not go through the courts in order to find the subscriber’s identity, I suspect that we will be in breach of the EU directives. Certainly, I would be very much against it because we need to enhance privacy on the internet, which is one of the reasons why I was thinking about how long this information is kept. The noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, raised the point that under the Data Protection Act, some of this information should be destroyed at regular intervals to ensure people’s privacy.