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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, this is another case where we need to balance a proper concern with the position of a subscriber with the need to keep flexibility where there is not good cause to stipulate otherwise. On the face of it, this is a reasonable limit to set on the time period between an alleged infringement taking place and the receipt of a notification by the internet service provider. As I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Clement Jones, I could not help reflecting that justice delayed is justice denied. It would certainly not be desirable for copyright infringement reports to refer to events a long time in the past, when it might be significantly more difficult for subscribers to recall the circumstances—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, said—and, if appropriate, form a defence. However, we should not accept the amendment, and I will explain why, although I absolutely concur with the principle. We need to be aware of the law of unintended consequences. Almost inevitably, if we set three months in the Bill, that will be adopted as the default period, rather than the limit that it is intended to be. We are right to leave that open in the expectation that the period between alleged infringement and the report being sent to the internet service provider should be a matter of days, rather than months. There might be exceptional circumstances—please do not overreact, I say that there might; it would have to be demonstrated—where it is justified that the time between an incident and the report is greater than three months, but, boy, that would have to be justified and demonstrated in the face of any appeal by a subscriber. We certainly take the view that notifications should not be delayed, but we do not want a default position of three months to be established, because that could be counterproductive. On balance, the better path is to trust the code—I do not want to go over again how the code is to be formulated, because we are familiar with that now—to deliver a fair and pragmatic approach to the time limit requirement. We take into account the point made by the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, that if we leave it too long, the system comes into disrepute, and the other point made about natural justice. Let us trust to the code to deliver a fair and pragmatic approach to the time limit requirement. Accordingly, in the light of the assurances and explanation that I have given, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.