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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, Amendment 168 suggests that we should take a position on the current dispute between publishers, internet search engines, news aggregators and others in order to defend and make clear where the boundaries of copyright should be in this area. Noble Lords may have seen briefing from publishers, newspaper publishers and magazine people on the amendment. They are happy to concede that a link in itself is not a breach of copyright; they also do not seem to quarrel with subsection (3) of the amendment which refers to a process of copying the copyright material in order to make the link and then disposing of it afterwards. What seems to cause a problem for them is the use of a brief extract of the copyright material to describe the link. A typical example of this would be to use Google images to search for images on the web. Google images display a small thumbnail of a picture so that you can flip through many pages while looking for a picture of Lord Lucas, or whatever catches your fancy—I am sure the Minister would never do such a thing—until you find one which is of the right Lord Lucas or is sufficiently horrible to suit your purposes. The newspaper publishers say that you should not be able to do that. Nor should you be allowed to take a short text extract—for example, the headline or half of the first sentence or whatever—sufficient to give an indication of what the link leads to. They claim that is copyright. I can see the argument. They are saying that the current fair use, which is limited to things such as reviews and research, does not cover the activities of search engines or news aggregators, and perhaps it does not. That is the reason for the amendment. It is time we debated this. We, as Parliament, ought to draw the boundaries at a fair place for copyright owners and in a proper place for users of the internet. A link should be properly described, and it should be possible to use an equivalent of the right to make short extracts from reviews in order to describe that link. The publishers’ associations should get back in their box. I beg to move.