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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I have a lot of sympathy for what the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, says. This is an area in which there is an advantage in being able to be flexible and move fast. I like the super-affirmative system; it allows for outside contributions and proper consideration, which we should allow for in our own legislative processes on occasions. The House of Commons took it up recently in Committee on the Education Bill when it took outside evidence as the first part of that process. We are lagging behind on that, and ought to make up the distance. My objection is to Clause 17’s underlying breadth, which the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, outlined extremely well. Yes, there is a purpose subsection at the beginning, but noble Lords who have read the Evening Standard for the past few days will have discovered that Westminster has decided to extend paid-for parking until midnight from about a month’s time to deal with problems that it anticipates during the Olympics—as if people will park in central London to get to the Olympics. Fortunately, we also have the background document, which says that this is actually entirely to do with raising money. None the less, it shows the extent to which a purpose subsection can be used. Clause 17 goes to the heart of copyright legislation and exposes the whole of that construct to the affirmative procedure. I would like a clause that was clearer and narrower. We are not totally in the dark; we know what steps people will take if they wish to continue to file-share illegally. They will use cyberlockers, encryption and proxy, and the Government, as my noble friend on the Front Bench has said, have no clue what to do about these things. Nor do I; these are very hard things to deal with. The only clear, technical way of dealing with them is to intrude extremely heavily into what people are doing on the net. I am not at all clear that the solution lies in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, but I suppose that once the Government have the power to amend an Act they can put anything they want into it to deal with a particular problem. We might find something in there that does not have anything particularly to do with copyright, but the Government have given no illustration of the sorts of things that they need to do to deal with the particular threats that they see coming. If we could focus on that, we might have an idea of how we can make Clause 17 acceptable. I would not be against something along those lines. My attention has been drawn to paragraph 136 in my noble friend Lord Fowler’s report, which I have been reading with interest, and to the quotation above it from an industry executive on the attitude that he would like his industry to have: ""You can have whatever you want when you want but it is going to cost you more or less"." That is the right attitude; we give customers what they want, charge them for it, and get tough if they do not pay. We need that transformation. Given how shaky the Government’s ability to deal with piracy is going to be, the industry really ought to be moving to giving customers what they want, how they want it, and when they want it. Then we will reduce this problem substantially. That is the right way in which to protect our copyright. Technology has outflanked us. Speaking as someone who has his own copyright interests, I do not think it defensible to stick with legislation and be tough with customers who misbehave. You give them something extra. You give them incentives to behave properly, and by and large they will. I do not mind the amendment at all, but I do not want it on top of Clause 17 as it is at the moment.