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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I shall comment on that. It will be difficult for these institutions to comply with the need to provide access that is as broad as possible to sources of knowledge on the internet while at the same time policing what is going on in their systems. The two could be fundamentally incompatible. This is the worry: libraries and universities are places of education and knowledge that may well want to provide unrestricted access to the internet and they do not want to turn themselves into policemen in these circumstances. That is not absolving them of all responsibility, but we may need to put them in a different category for the purposes of compliance with the Bill. They are non-commercial operations with a clear academic and knowledge purpose and so are rather different from most of those with whom we are dealing. I thought that the Minister put it rather well. As regards this set of provisions, my glass is half full. He said that the institutions would not become helpless victims on the one hand or have draconian conditions imposed on them on the other. By using those phrases, the Minister has almost outlined the problems.