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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, this is an interesting idea. I certainly sympathise with the desire to ensure that the courts are not clogged up with many thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases, while simultaneously ensuring that those who continue to infringe, despite repeated notifications, suffer some penalty. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, will not be surprised to hear that we do not think that this amendment works as it would prevent the copyright holder identifying the subscriber in order to reach any out-of-court settlement. Nor do we think that it would add very much to how this part of the process would work. It might be helpful if I outline what we expect would happen. Once a copyright owner decides that they should take action against someone on the copyright infringement list, they would apply to the court for an order to get the ISP to release the identifying data. They would then write to the subscriber, setting out the allegation of infringement and seeking an out-of-court settlement. It is entirely right that this should happen, as it is important to keep cases out of court if an amicable settlement can be arrived at, and it may be that it can. The proposition of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would provide a rate card of potential levels of damages that copyright owners could properly seek from the subscriber. This also raises problems since different infringements would cause different levels of damage. A pre-release film, for example, would cause a very different amount of damage from a number of relatively old music singles. In addition, the level of damage would depend on the individual loss to the copyright owner, which could be very different as between different copyright owners even for the same type of material—for example, a pre-release film which is expected to have a worldwide release as opposed to one likely to have very limited circulation. In the light of my explanation, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.