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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am delighted that we are making progress in this direction. Whether the Government will listen to the siren voices of British Telecom and others saying that this is a step in the wrong direction, I do not know. It seems to me that that was where Clause 17 was aiming. The Government wanted to get away with something much broader and much less definite and, now that they are confronted with something specific, they seem to be running away from it. That shows how right we were to delete Clause 17. There are clearly major issues to be settled. We ought to be making it inconvenient for people to find illegal material. There will always be people who will go to great lengths to find stuff that they should not. They are a small minority and it takes a lot of their time. We want to deal with the ordinary people who are finding it terribly easy to find illegal material. It is as if every street was lined with stalls selling counterfeit goods. If we can just take them off, yes, new ones will pop up, but they take time to get known and, when they are known, you knock them off. If you go in this direction with Clause 18, you deal with the bulk of the business. Certainly in that way we begin to answer the questions raised by the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, in Committee, about people who are streaming football matches straight after the game or maybe during the game. These people have identifiable sites. People know where to go. You knock them on the head. Sure, a few will pop up elsewhere but, before they can do any damage, they become big enough to notice and you sit on them again. That seems to me the sensible approach. We will need proper protection for search engines. We will need to think carefully to what extent they can be asked to block material. I think that they will have to be asked to block material to some extent. I looked for a copy of Stephen Fry reading one of the Harry Potter stories the other day, which he does beautifully. Listening to it is a wonderful experience. When I looked for it on Google, the first three pages were occupied by illegal material. It was extremely difficult to find something that was legal. It was easy enough to identify the illegal material because it all referred to BitTorrent. It would be easy enough to drop those services from the index, as they advertise that they are illegal. I do not see why search engines should not be able to block these things. Taking them out of search engine results would be one of the most obvious ways of making life inconvenient and one of the easiest ways of doing so, compared with trying to block individuals’ internet traffic. This will be a productive way to go. I suspect that it will require a lot more consideration than we have had time to give it, but I go back to my amendment tabled in Committee. This is where Clause 17 ought to have been heading. As has been suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, if this gets struck from the Bill in the wash-up, we certainly ought immediately to begin discussions on how we can make a success of going down this route to deal effectively with piracy at source, rather than just prosecuting those who happen to be drinking the counterfeit rum.