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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I entirely agree with Amendment 168; my Amendment 173 tackles the same question in different words. Amendment 172 is intended to make sure that the industry has looked after its side of the bargain. In return for passing this Bill, we should be requiring that the industry moves ahead and makes product easily available on the internet in proper volume, at a proper price. Its failure to do this is the reason for the whole problem. This market developed and the industry refused to address it—it turned its back on it. People, particularly young people, said, "We are not having that. If they will not give us this stuff in the way that we want it we are going to get it". I have an enormous amount of sympathy with that. I agree that we must tackle the problem and deal with the piracy that has developed, but we should not allow the industry to continue to create the conditions where piracy flourishes. We should not allow it to continue to encourage people into piracy because it will not provide its product in the way and at the time that people want it. Certainly, people ought to be able to hold product back: I am not at all saying that someone who comes up with something which is not public should be protected in some way. But at the moment the industry is refusing to license additional outlets for the internet availability of music, and although the wholesale price of a music track is somewhere around 20p—not the retail price, of course, the wholesale price—it is trying to run vastly inflated prices on new entrants trying to come into the market and compete with iTunes. That is pure monopoly behaviour and we are creating the monopoly for the industry in this Bill. We are giving it additional defences. We must require that the industry, as well as ourselves, address the problem, or else it will merely occur in another and more difficult form. We already know that there are technical ways around this Bill—that is why Clause 17 is sitting in there, not that I think it is satisfactory. We already know that people will use cyberlockers or encryption. The only answer to this is to make sure that the industry keeps its side of the bargain and makes product easily available at a sensible price so that people do not have to go down the piracy route, and so that they do not go down this route because they cannot get at the stuff that they want, but because they do not want to pay the proper price for it. Under those circumstances the sanctions we have in this Bill are justified. However, if the industry refuses to make product available—"Avatar" is a very good example of a refusal to make product available when customers want it—why should we defend it? It does not seem to be part of the copyright bargain that we should allow that.