---

Digital Economy Bill [HL]

This amendment illustrates why we should have started by looking at the whole issue of copyright in the digital age, rather than starting with an attack on people breaching copyright in the digital age. We have gone about things the wrong way round. Copyright is a complicated thing. I did not realise until a week ago that apparently, with regard to what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has just said, it is illegal to accuse someone of trademark infringement or of patent infringement. You have to go about it in a much more oblique way. I cannot remember quite how it is done, but you cannot just come out with a bare-faced statement. That does not apply to copyright law because copyright law is much weaker in its protections. That is also why there is a much longer term in which to recover the value of your copyright. The term is now lifetime plus 70 years, whereas typically it is 30 years for a patent. If people are behaving like this, we should be looking at what protections we give to copyright, and that should be done at a far more fundamental level than just including something in a Digital Economy Bill. However, as we need to put it somewhere, we should include a provision like this or we will get into trouble. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is quite right about that. The Government really have to think about protecting people or we will see an awful lot of abuse that will make some of the other scams that take place on the internet look like chicken feed.