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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 68, I wish to speak also to Amendments 70 and 71. These three amendments share a common purpose to increase the pressure in the Bill on the rights owners, particularly the larger ones, to move towards providing their customers with what their customers want, in the way that they want it and with the time limits that they want. The failure of the rights industry to do this has been at the root of the problems that this part of the Bill addresses. In some sections they still drag their feet terribly. Indeed, some extraordinarily bullish statements are coming out of Mr Bronfman and others in the United States. They need to understand—perhaps they will understand this from the previous vote as much as anything else—that there are limits to the degree to which we are prepared to punish our citizens in the cause of rights owners who have not played their part in the compact that is copyright. The point of copyright is to allow citizens access to creative material. There are two parts to it: one is protection for the creators; the other is access for the citizen. If we are not getting the access to the citizen bit, we are not going to jump up and down on our citizens as a result. The Bill could do with being improved in this respect by flagging up actions that Ofcom needs to take to make it absolutely clear to the creative industry that it has to be constructive and to move on this issue, and that we will not work to maintain over the long term the dissonance between the industry and its customers. The industry has to come into balance with its customers and to find ways of providing the copyright content to them that they will by and large accept so that the desire to go down the illegal route is greatly diminished. The three amendments come back to a discussion that we had in Committee in which we said that we really ought to be looking not just at the degree of illegal file-sharing but at the degree of legal file-sharing, and that we ought to look at all aspects of the use of copyright material. There has to be strong co-operation between copyright owners and internet service providers. They really ought to be working together in the way that Apple has shown is possible with iTunes. There is no natural division—it has just grown up that way. Copyright owners kept to themselves and internet service providers kept to themselves. Copyright owners still make it extremely difficult for internet service providers to offer a subscription service for music or film to go with people’s internet subscription because the whole business of negotiating rights is extremely slow and lengthy, particularly for the smaller organisations. I am aware, in particular, that the Association of Independent Music has been trying to put together a project in which a certain ISP will work with rights holders to produce these sorts of packages, rather along the lines of what has been done in Denmark. However, there has been immense dragging of heels, particularly by the big American publishers and the interests that they represent. There really has to be some force from the Government to shift these discussions along or all the efforts that we are putting into this Bill will come to nothing because of the pig-headedness of the rights holders. I should very much like to see the Government, through this Bill, push hard to make sure that we get a constructive resolution to this matter. We need to do all that we can to avoid having to go through some kind of catharsis, where internet copyright becomes effectively unenforceable, to ensure that we get a change of management in the big copyright-holding organisations and end up with people who will deal with the realities of the modern world. I beg to move.