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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, the noble Lord has hit it on the head. The purpose of these institutions is to be educational, not to act as a policeman. I entirely accept the imposition of an obligation on academic institutions to do precisely that; I am sure that it would be wholly beneficial. One of the key problems is that it is precisely this age group that does not recognise the need to respect copyright and the rights of creative owners. It is a kind of social issue and it implies that a level of education is needed, although not the more draconian aspects that the Minister has outlined. However, I recognise that the Minister is not particularly sympathetic to that. Clearly we need to take the matter away and, in conjunction with some of these institutions, think about how we can improve on this amendment, which the Minister did not find to his liking. The second set of amendments was intended to try to limit the liability of certain ISPs in these circumstances. The Bill refers to the threshold being based on the number of notifications received, but that is not a very accurate method of measuring illegal file-sharing and it is extremely subjective. It does not measure how many megabytes of information are downloaded, for example. The amendments are an attempt to be rather more precise. The number of notifications is simply a measurement of how effectively and how frequently the copyright owner undertakes fishing on file-sharing in relation to which ISPs may choose to send notifications and there is a risk that certain ISPs could be targeted in order to achieve the threshold. Those are the dangers of not having a specific threshold of the type that I have tried to set out in the amendment. We shall carry on with that endeavour because I believe that the copyright infringement report, the CIR, is a very blunt instrument to use in these circumstances. I have no doubt that we shall continue this debate but, in the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 86 withdrawn. Amendment 87 not moved. Amendment 88 Moved by