---

Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I should be very grateful if the noble Lord could enlarge on why he thinks the solutions to this problem lie in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. It seems that copyright is quite clear on this: somebody is either making copyright material available for purchase without payment or permission of the copyright owner, or they are acquiring material knowing that the copyright owner is not to be paid. Dealing with that effectively is all about the sort of mechanisms we are putting into the Communications Act, which seems a sensible place to have a power to vary what we can do by way of enforcement under the Act. Why are we meddling with copyright? What changes to copyright can be imagined that help the sort of things that might happen? As the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, said, Napster came up and was a surprise to us all, but the principle was the same. We would not have needed to change copyright to deal with Napster or anything like it. We do not need to go at copyright in a big way, nor have we been, to deal with peer-to-peer. The fundamental human actions are the same. All we need to do is make them clearly illegal and find ways of preventing them in the world outside. The copyright remains the same.