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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I confess that I am one of these people who on occasion does not understand whether something that I want to do on the computer is legal or not. For example, I get e-mails from a company called 3B Software which offers for a small annual sum of about £30 unlimited access to television stations round the world and to as many films as I want to watch. If I am paying, is it legal? I do not know. I do not know whether if I took the offer from that company it would be legal. I would be paying for it but I do not know whether the company has the copyright on the films or television programmes that it is offering. The noble Lord’s amendment brings out certain things about the legislation. I was going to refer to the present but I am not sure whether the clauses are about the present; they are more about the past, and they certainly do not take account of the future. I have Virgin Media at my home in Hamilton in Scotland and I can get 50 megabytes broadband. By the end of this year I will be offered 100 megabytes broadband, which will allow me to stream—not download—HD quality television or film direct on to the computer. Noble Lords may ask who wants to watch a film on computer, but if I can wireless it to my television set I will be streaming. Again, I am not sure whether watching a streamed film is legal as opposed to downloading a film which is illegal. I hope that somebody can enlighten me on that. Equally, we are all going to increasingly download and save on to Cloud technology. We are not going to have it on our own hard disks; we are going to have it somewhere up in the air. I am not sure whether the technology we are talking is taken account of in these clauses. I will finish with a point about music. Some pop people have woken up to the fact that they cannot make money in that way, because of illegal downloading and the rest of it; they sell their music direct to customers on the internet. You download the piece of music and you pay them for it. You do not go through a music publisher or whatever. Pop stars now recognise that they no longer make their money from selling records; they make their money from the records publicising their concert tours and by appearing live in concert. That is the way in which it has gone. My noble friend is quite right. We have to look forward to see how on earth we can ensure—because I think quite rightly that those who produce artistic goods should be paid for them—that we can do that without penalising those who are not sure whether they are dealing with legal or illegal matters.