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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 170. Although ISPs have the major role to play, copyright owners have a crucial role to play, too. It is they who generate the evidence on which the whole process is based. How they do that, the methods and technicalities of the systems that they are using and the quality of the evidence that they are generating are an enormously important part of moving to a system where the justice is more summary than that which is available through the civil courts. It seems to me that they cannot black-box this stuff; they cannot say, "This evidence is true but we aren’t going to tell you how we got it". They have to disclose to Ofcom the exact methods that they are using and they have to expose those methods to a critical analysis, so that Ofcom can be sure that that part of the process is working well enough to justify the rest of the process. I think, therefore, that they should be included in this clause.