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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, the Government agree that copyright should not impair people’s ability to link to content which is intended to be publicly available on the internet. However, it is not clear that the activities listed in the amendment would constitute copyright infringement. To the extent that they do constitute infringement, the law already has an exemption for temporary copying which is designed to facilitate browsing the internet and caching. This is covered in Section 28A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. It is unclear how the new provision would work with this existing exemption. It would simply create confusion. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, also referred to search engines and content aggregators. These face additional challenges in linking to web content, in particular, those associated with automatic provision of excerpts. However, it is right that they should face the restriction of not copying a substantial part of a work. Search and aggregation are both important but so, too, are the rights of content creators. Some of these issues are currently the subject of litigation before the Copyright Tribunal in Meltwater v the Newspaper Licensing Agency. There was also a question about whether it is possible to use short excerpts of a work without infringing copyright. Ownership of copyright in a work gives the owner exclusive rights to do certain acts in relation to that work. Infringement occurs if a person does any of those acts in relation to the whole or a substantial part of that work without the consent of the right holder. It is possible to use excerpts of a work without the permission of the right holder and without infringing copyright if those excerpts are not substantial, or if one of the statutory exemptions applies. Unfortunately, we do not believe that this amendment helps the situation. I have tried to be clear and to give some further assurances in my comments. We will look at the situation, but, at the moment, we feel that this amendment is not the right one. I hope that, in the light of my comments, the noble Lord will feel capable of withdrawing the amendment.