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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, the amendment is essential, particularly in view of Amendment 112 which replaced the original Clause 17. Under that clause, a court can give an injunction where a substantial proportion of the content is made accessible via a specified online location—in other words, it will catch search engines. I declare an interest in that I have an association with a search engine called Pingar which aggregates information for business purposes into small reports, with headings, URL and a short description—which is exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is talking about—so that businesses can use that URL to drill down and find possibly copyright material. They would then pay for that material because they would be going through a proper place where they can be charged accordingly. This acts as an advertisement, effectively, for copyright material and I cannot understand why many people would object to it. Newspapers will themselves have to be careful. When they quote chunks of a report or other articles—which they do from time to time—that is surely bringing things together, aggregating and introducing copyright material into an article that they are publishing. Therefore, in trying to protect themselves, they will probably make it so that they cannot carry out reporting in the way that they do at the moment. As I have always said, it would have been better to tackle this through a rewrite of the Copyright, Designs and Patents 1988, but that is not going to happen in the near future. Whoever becomes the next Government will not tackle the issue because they will probably feel that they have tackled enough of it in the Digital Economy Bill. However, the Bill is not nearly sufficient to begin to touch the surface of what we should be doing in a digital age. Unfortunately I do not think anything else will be done in the near future, in which case the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is absolutely essential; otherwise the search engines and other people will get into a huge amount of difficulty. It will all end up in a very expensive test case and it will be left to judges to sort out the mess. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that this issue is for Parliament to decide; it is not for people to interpret bits of law, particularly bits written in haste without adequate public consultation. If the Minister does not accept the amendment, I hope that he will give a guarantee to bring one back at Third Reading which covers protections for search engines, aggregators and news sites.