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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, these are extremely important amendments. They must be there to guide Ofcom in its deliberations. My noble friend said that the copyright resides with the originators, but usually it does not. It is owned by six large rights holders—copyright holding companies—because they have the originators under contract from day one. Only a very small amount of money filters out to the creators the work. Most of it is rental on the back catalogue owned by large rights holders. We have to keep that in the back of our minds when we are told that this will kill creativity—it is not necessarily so. The main point I want to make is about the unintended consequences that may arise when we implement the technical measures and why Ofcom must take into account wider considerations The sort of thing that could happen is that a company sets up and sensibly wishes to deliver most of its stuff over the internet. It is selling into a market that also happens to coincide with people who have an age profile in the group that tends to download music—music being the easy one to catch as it is the most popular in this area. You could stop their market and bankrupt them overnight. It is a bit like secondary picketing by the trades unions: the same principle of trying to prevent one evil while actually creating another. The same applies to the Government in their delivery of services electronically to reduce costs to taxpayers. If we end up having to intervene to make this effective, by cutting off a tiny proportion of infringers, say 100,000, it could have an impact. If we tackled just 10 per cent of the infringers, which is not an enormous proportion, 700,000 people would be unable to use the internet properly. That is a significant part of the market. Funnily enough, it would probably also penalise those with good, innovative methods of distributing music and film. At the other end of these connections will be subscribers who both download to sample stuff unlawfully and buy stuff lawfully. So it may have an effect on the market that we should be developing. This needs to be considered incredibly carefully. A final thing is proportionality and the EU. The European Parliament, in saying that people’s internet could be cut off only by going through judicial procedure, recognised that these days it is almost a basic human right to have access to the internet. Our legislation must be proportionate or it will fall foul of EU legislation. On those grounds alone, proportionality must be put in it somewhere.