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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

These amendments raise very important issues. Probably the most important issue, despite the Government’s introduction of a requirement for the search to be ““reasonable””, is how much diligence is applied to the search for an orphan work. The European Digital Libraries Initiative set of EU guidelines on what constitutes a diligent search is a remarkable and comprehensive document that is extremely useful. It came rather too late to table an amendment to reflect it, but I believe that ““diligent”” should be used instead of ““reasonable”” in relation to a search. One of the ways in which the Government could provide greater reassurance in Clause 42 in particular is by ratcheting up the amount of diligence that is required on a search. The British Library, the National Libraries of Wales and of Scotland and the European Library have been consulted on this document, so I think it has quite a lot of acceptance in the cultural sector. I wanted to highlight it, rather sneakily, in our debate on this set of amendments. I could not speak in our debate on a previous group of amendments, so this was a convenient moment in which to mention this set of guidelines.