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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I am grateful to noble Lords for speaking to these amendments. On Amendment 292A, it is already the case that alteration of electronic rights management information, which may include metadata, is actionable in the same way as copyright infringement. We feel that the effect of this amendment would be to make it unlawful and potentially criminal to supply the systems used by rights holders to edit their own metadata. This is not something that the Government would wish to do. The current law is wise to focus on unauthorised tampering with metadata rather than the means of doing so. The Government are not sympathetic to Amendment 292A but we have considerable sympathy with Amendment 292B, which is to allow rights holders to control the terms of use of copyright works by, for example, web search providers. However, it is not clear that the amendment is needed: rights holders can already set these terms, and any infringement of their copyright is actionable in the courts. There are also risks of adverse consequences to legitimate web search and other valued services. On Amendment 292D, the Government recognise that many creators have concerns about this issue. Moral rights are an important part of copyright and should be respected wherever it is practical to do so. I am grateful to the noble Viscount for emphasising that matter today and giving us the opportunity to have a meeting in which we were able to discuss these issues with some degree of thoroughness, which is not the case this evening to the same extent. We recognise the concerns raised by the noble Viscount and will continue to look at this issue. I understand that officials have already carried out an informal information gathering exercise on this subject, and I am sure they will continue to explore the issues with parties from both sides of the debate. We do not underestimate the importance of this issue but we think it will be resolved better on an industry basis rather than in a formal amendment to the Bill. I hope the noble Viscount will be prepared to withdraw his amendment.