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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am sorry to enter this debate at a late stage. I have only just worked out that what is now Amendment 120A was Amendment 112 last night. I was alarmed because I did not expect such a radical measure from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench. It raises serious problems, as the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, said, and introduces a novel procedure. I was not much enamoured with Clause 17 and still have my doubts about it. But it is undoubtedly true that the amendments that the Government have brought forward plus the super-affirmative resolution greatly narrow Clause 17 and make it more subject to parliamentary scrutiny. However, the problem with both approaches is that they are attempting on the narrow basis of what this part of the Bill is primarily about, which is peer-to-peer file-sharing, to build a whole new approach to copyright in the digital age. What is really required—the noble Earl also referred to this—is a more comprehensive approach to copyright protection and its impact on consumers and rights holders in the digital age. What puzzles me is that that process is being pursued in another part of the Minister's department in terms of a copyright strategy engaging the Intellectual Property Office and so forth. There are also developments at European level. At some point within a year or two we will have to return to this to develop a more modern approach to copyright and intellectual property more broadly and relate that to the digital age. In the mean time, the original Clause 17 was far too broad and blunt, but I am afraid that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, also sounds too repressive to me. I will consider where I stand on Clause 17 when we come to it. My key point is that the Minister needs to consider whether we should take these comprehensive aspects of the Bill away and focus on the narrower area of peer-to-peer file-sharing and return in a more sympathetic and considered way, with—I see that my noble friend Lord Puttnam is in his place—a fair degree of pre-legislative scrutiny about how we approach copyright issues in the longer and broader term.