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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I hope nobody does hang on any of my words. To treat this seriously, I repeat that I am surprised nobody has complained and that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has not advised people to do that. As I said, we will see what else we can do when we write to the Ministry of Justice. I want to take the opportunity to respond to a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Howard, because I did not do so earlier. He made a valid point that the existence of the new notification system as proposed by the Bill will make it much more difficult for copyright owners to behave as they have been doing recently. It is entirely possible that a court that now issues orders for the release of names and addresses on the detail of just one infringement might well start to expect copyright owners to have gone through the process of issuing notifications and seeking to take legal action only against the repeat infringers once this process exists, rather than to issue legal letters on a scattergun approach. It might also be that courts, before they start agreeing to instruct internet service providers, might again look at the examples of the process that we will have identified in the code and see whether that process has been gone through. That is a bit of an assumption, but it is a reasonable one in the circumstances.