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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I suspect that we are not going to agree on "Avatar". It seems to me that the industry is being peculiarly stupid about it—it got 300,000 free advertisements. "Avatar" is something that you cannot consume sensibly on a small screen: you need the big-screen experience to appreciate all the work that they have put into it. The immediate consumption of it created an enormous demand for going to the cinema, which has benefited the film enormously. That is the fundament of this—we must get the industry to see this as an opportunity and not as a threat. We must get the industry to be in there selling these downloads. If the industry had been in there selling at a dollar a time, it would be better off for it and it would still get the advertising. Its refusal to deal with the way that the world has moved on and with what technology makes possible, and its attempt to stick to old ways of doing things and to the idea that you can release a film in the United States today and wait six months to release it in the UK, is a looking-backwards attitude which we should not support through legislation. Yes, we should support copyright, but we should direct ourselves at real losses and not imagined losses. I do not believe that the makers of "Avatar" have lost a dollar; in fact, I think that they have gained a great deal from the piracy. We should not seek to punish people for losses that have not occurred. When we come back to the question of what is going to happen on the Bill, after what I agree are shaping up to be quite reasonable preliminary procedures, we must have something to make sure that Norwich Pharmacal orders are not given, willy-nilly, to people who have not gone through this procedure. We have produced some comfort for the citizen in the Bill; we must at least make sure that judges consider whether or not this procedure should be used before Norwich Pharmacal orders are granted. We must also do something about the quantum of damages that is being sought. In a civil procedure on a technical matter, it amounts to blackmail; the cost of defending one of these things is reckoned to be £10,000. You can get away with asking for £500 or £1,000 and be paid on most occasions without any effort having to be made to really establish guilt. It is straightforward legal blackmail, and we should do something about it by making sure that where damages are asked for, they are, at least for first offenders, at a rational level. That said, I do not think the Minister addressed the phrasing of either of my amendments. I did not hear a reference to the Human Rights Act aspect. I apologise; I am going deaf.