Drafts:Digital Economy Bill/Day 2

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Some quotes from day 2 of the committee stage in the Lords: Official Transcript

More information can be found here.

Contents 1 Lord Young 2 Lord Wade 3 Lord Lucas 4 Lord Maxton 5 Lord Howard 6 Viscount Bridgeman 7 Lord Mitchell 8 Lord Triesman 9 Lord Birt 10 Earl of Erroll 11 Lord Whitty 12 Lord Davies 13 Lord Clement-Jones 14 Baroness Miller 15 Lord De Mauley

Lord Young

3.45pm

"If one looks at the digital, broadband or even the mobile market, one could hardly say that these are not highly competitive environments with a wide range of providers."

4.00pm

"Compulsory licensing where a copyright owner is told that they must license their property to a third party should be avoided unless there are very compelling reasons to consider it"

5.45pm

"I recognise that the apparent infringements are not tested and proved to court standards."

"Copyright owners will not be able to issue such notices on a whim or with insufficient justification."

Lord Wade

3.45pm

"We could not foresee the things that have happened in the past five years, and we have no idea what will happen in the next five years."

Lord Lucas

3.45pm

"It seems to me that most of us are mystified about why the Government should wish to nationalise Nominet."

"I am puzzled that the Government should feel so twitchy about this. I should like to be sure that, should they act, they are totally clear, open and consultative about the way that they do it."

4.15pm

"particularly when it involves putting them not in the hands of the criminal law with all the safeguards, care and rationality that involves, but in the hands of firms of solicitors who are out to make a buck from the process. None of these people are nice to deal with. Even where the majors have been involved in prosecutions—there are not many cases of that—they are relentless. It is not at all nice to be on the receiving end of one of their prosecutions. They can take a long time, cost a great deal of money and go on, with unspecified consequences, for a period of years."

"the evidence has usually been provided by a company abroad that does not disclose the methods by which it has been obtained. It may well have been obtained against data protection rules—that is certainly the conclusion that the Swiss and French authorities seem to have reached."

"This seems a disreputable thing to wish upon our citizens."

"We ought to produce something civilised, aimed—as is much of the first bit of Clauses 4 to 17—at education and persuasion, and where at the end of the day there is due process and reasonableness in the consequences for our citizens."

"these are not nice people to fall foul of." [Referring to industry solicitors]

"The methods that they use to extract money are not nice, and I do not mean just the fringe operators. That applies to dealing with a difficult-to-refute allegation in the civil justice system."

5.00pm

"I apologise to the noble Lord for the use of the word 'criminalise'. 'Civilise', which I suppose would be the equivalent, did not seem quite right in the circumstances."

"We should not forget that the main companies involved have methods of protecting their copyright that they have chosen not to use"

"It is not as if they are alone in the world without a friend or way of looking after their own interests."

"We should also not put ourselves in a position where we are encouraging these industries to stay in the market positions that they are in at the moment."

"these big companies are used to their old comfortable ways and seem to want to stick to them."

"People love going to the cinema ... It is an extraordinary experience on a big screen. However, why do the companies not sell DVDs and allow the downloading of copies of the film at the same time?"

"These companies created the piracy problem. They are continuing to create it. We must not, in this Bill, give them the illusion that they can stay where they are and that beating up on their customers is the solution to all their problems."

"the owners of the rights—the companies, the individuals—cannot have it both ways... They cannot, on the one hand, say that they want the huge effort that is being made by the Government, by the ISPs, by their own companies and by Ofcom to get a code that everyone will observe, and, on the other hand, say that they also want exactly the same rights to pursue individuals in the ways that have been criticised."

5.15pm

"Copyright at its heart is not a right, it is a compromise. Copyright can be described as a tax or as a monopoly. Neither is a desirable thing to my mind. Copyright is merely what we do—the tough, difficult, bad things we do in order to enable the good thing, which is creativity, to flourish. It is inherently, therefore, a balance between the costs we impose on the innocent enjoyment of good things by members of the public in return for making it possible that such good things can be created."

"we could establish a reasonable and rational level of cost for the infringer, rather than leaving him at the mercy of the courts and of solicitors who push on the fear factor."

5.45pm

"allegations are based on very secretive processes carried out under no known protocol and of uncertain legality"

"I am still bemused as to how the Government think that they will get evidence."

Lord Maxton

4.00pm

"if I pay a licence fee, at the end of the day I am paying the BBC to make programmes, not to view just on the one occasion that they are broadcast, but at any time in the future"

4.30pm

"The fact is that the music industry and the audio side have attempted to deal with the problem in ways that are not legally prescriptive."

"performers are now beginning to sell their product straight on to the internet to be purchased by youngsters"

"performers now make their money not from selling records of any sort, but by going out and performing live to the public"

"the music industry has realised that the solicitors’ letters sent to some people have not been a major deterrent."

"surely the industries themselves have got see how they can deal with it."

5.45pm

"If I watch a film on my computer without downloading it on to the computer, on a stream basis, is that an infringement of copyright?"

Lord Howard

4.15pm

"...our hope that the provisions lead to a significant reduction in illegal sharing without the courts being used."

Viscount Bridgeman

4.15pm

"The amendment, which proposes a system of two warnings and then a throttle, is in danger of assuming that the rights owner is a corporation with deep pockets. It must not prevent individual creators taking action against unauthorised online use of their work."

Lord Mitchell

4.15pm

"every single child in this country is doing—you would be hard pressed to find any person under the age of 25 who is not illegally downloading."

"There is a huge danger here. A huge group of our people are doing something that they do not think is wrong or a crime. It is dangerous for us to be putting into effect legislation that puts a whole lot of people in a criminal situation when they do not think that they are committing a crime."

"To young people, the big film and music companies are often seen as the enemy, as bodies which have charged exorbitant prices for their products over time, so there is no sense of guilt about downloading."

Lord Triesman

4.30pm

"we will not make our living digging things out of the ground or beating on metal to any extent. We will make it out of our innovation, our inventiveness and our being at the front edge of what we are capable of achieving."

"if we really value the innovative structure that is a great capability of this country’s economy, then there need to be proportionate means of trying to deal with this."

"We found huge evidence that many people not only download material; you can find in car boot sales and market stalls vast quantities of material that has been stolen and downloaded, frequently associated with illegal immigrants taking part in the marketing of it."

"if they really wanted to hear that kind of music in the future—music of the indie bands and others who were being driven out of doing what they do in the creative industries in this country—they needed to change what they did."

"It needs a long-stop, and that long-stop is vital to music, to film, to sport and to very many other sectors."

Lord Birt

4.30pm

"The theft of an electronic good has an exact moral equivalence with the theft of a physical good."

"We simply have to end a perception that is at the heart of the difficulties increasingly faced by the creative industries."

"There is no major creative industry, either in this country or in other places, that has not been massively and adversely affected by the scale of this theft."

"I remind your Lordships that the best evidence we have shows that something like half of all internet activity is tied up with copyright theft."

"a massive threat not just to any industry, but to one that is a critical part of our national cultural life"

"let us not dodge the issue that it matters that large numbers of young people think that such theft is okay."

"[The technology involved] is not all that complicated. The only person who is going to be captured by this legislation is someone who freely offers on the internet at an identified moment in time—we know exactly where they are coming from, so to speak—material that it is unlawful to provide."

Earl of Erroll

4.30pm

"I find that none of these statistics adds up, so we should be very wary of quoting any of them."

4.45pm

"I get fed up with hearing that peer-to-peer file-sharing is unlawful. It is file-sharing that is unlawful by whatever technical means. Peer-to-peer just happens to be one of the common technologies used for it. I do not like the fact that in Digital Britain and other places they put 'unlawful peer-to-peer file-sharing'. It should be peer-to-peer unlawful file-sharing."

"Peer-to-peer technology is very useful for various purposes."

5.15pm

"If we do not comply with that in the Bill, we will be in breach of our commitments to Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights."

"The Minister’s certificate on the front of the Bill may actually be misleading."

"the Bill protects the back catalogue of six or so large digital rights companies."

"On the whole, the small people will not be protected by patent law because they cannot afford it. There will be no one on the internet looking for their songs being downloaded and no one interested in pursuing those cases. The small people are already putting their stuff out through other methods."

"It has been shown that a lot of the people who do this downloading also spend a lot of money on other products associated with it, so the concept that these people are losing all their money because there is downloading going on is not necessarily true."

"I remember back to when the music industry said it was going to be wiped out by the Philips cassette. Exactly the same thing went on. It tried to crack down on people caught with Philips cassette recorders and ban the production of machines with two cassette decks which were clearly for copying cassettes. Did it make any difference? At the end of the day, no."

" 'Avatar' is an interesting example. Has it suffered as a result of the fact that 300,000 copies have been made? Would people have gone to the cinema anyway? Perhaps they will go to watch it in full 3D glory, having sampled it on an inadequate little screen."

"These things [online copyright infringement] may have benefits."

"I am afraid that that is what we are losing sight of by trying to pretend that the whole creative industry will collapse without protection."

"We need something that will protect the human rights of the ordinary citizen in a proportionate way."

5.45pm

"the Bill is probably not going about the issue in the right way."

6.00pm

"this amendment highlights the dangers in this Bill of handing incredible powers to the Secretary of State to stigmatise or interfere with desirable technologies."

"The Government do not realise the unintended consequences of what they are doing. They are so blinkered; they are looking at one issue only and not the other, desirable effects which get hit by the same thing."

"I do not want to see peer-to-peer stigmatised as the thing that is illegal or unlawful. It is not."

Lord Whitty

4.45pm

"there are better ways of getting people to move on to legal forms of file-sharing than criminalising it up front"

"it is not sensible to approach [the problem] by effectively alienating large chunks of the population when there is an alternative. The alternative may take longer, but it is clear that, both in the present system of going to the courts and in the potential of the system proposed in the Bill, proportionality will go out of the window."

"we should not [tackle this problem] by taking a bludgeon first and not giving a legal way out."

"In the long run, a move across to legal forms of file-sharing will be much more beneficial to those genuine rights holders whose interests my noble friend Lord Triesman and the noble Lord, Lord Birt, are upholding."

5.15pm

"there are issues of proportionality, of due process, and of privacy, all of which would be covered by reference to a check against the Human Rights Act"

Lord Davies

4.45pm

"On most sides there is recognition of the serious problems and of the great difficulties involved in solving them."

"the problem at the present time was that those who needed to get on with the business of suing successfully were having great difficulties"

"the problems faced by ordinary citizens through the depredations of lawyers, acting often on behalf of significant interests, who are conducting themselves in ¦429ways which are exploitative of our fellow citizens."

"the issue is not one of a gentle warning note or anything like that; nor is it one in which the lawyers operating in this way expect the issue to go to court action; it is one which is exploitative of people’s fears. The demands go out and people respond because they are under a great deal of pressure from those demands; they feel that a court case will put them in great difficulty and therefore concede."

"a lot of downloading activity goes on among young people who, if not acting in full innocence, are certainly not setting out to be law breakers"

"As a fair percentage of the people in the age bracket he identified are voters, I am sure that we do not want to be in the business of criminalising them in this year of Grace 2010."

"consumers and consumer organisations are greatly concerned about the issue of actions by certain law firms"

"James Cameron’s film 'Avatar' had one of the most successful launches of any film in the history of the cinema, but it has been calculated that there were 300,000 downloads on the day it was released."

"others may be in a position where the whole of their potential profit would be lost in these circumstances [i.e. due to their materials being downloaded]."

5.00pm

"The issue then arises ... of where our creative industries and creative minds are going to be if they are stripped of the rewards of their enterprise, activity and creativity."

"Rather than resorting to a scattergun approach, copyright owners will be able to focus their attentions on those who appear to be infringing most."

"Because the Bill provides a much more effective way of defending copyright owners’ rights, we are confident that most responsible copyright owners will want to work through this process. I accept that this will not prevent those who see this more as a revenue-generating activity from using existing law, but it is of course the opportunity to defend an action if someone is convinced that they have indeed been accused without good cause."

"we will investigate further with the Ministry of Justice and others within the Government with an interest to see if there are other ways in which the bullying activity"

Lord Clement-Jones

5.15pm

"the areas where we want to see changes ... concern the quality of evidence that is presented, the burden of proof and the necessity of ensuring that sanctions are proportionate, codes are clear, costs are fairly apportioned, thresholds are proportionate, and that the overall scheme of things is not oppressive to those who it is claimed are in breach of copyright."

5.30pm

"The Minister claimed that the Bill is compliant with EU law. He claimed that elements such as the fact that subscribers can be heard as a right of appeal make the Bill compliant. The reason for the amendment is that we do not believe that the Bill is compliant with those principles."

"There are many aspects that need to be explicit but are not stated."

"The information obtained by copyright owners, and in a sense laid before ISPs, is allegations of breach of copyright, not infringements in themselves."

5.45pm

"it is important that we do not stray over the boundaries and suddenly think that people are 'guilty'. Otherwise, we will not have due process"

Baroness Miller

5.15pm

"Checking on other people’s internet traffic to see whether file-sharing is taking place is akin to opening somebody’s post in envelopes to see whether they have illegally photocopied books"

"Can the Minister explain a little how that technical process is going to take place, and also how the person accused of that will refute the allegation?"

Lord De Mauley

5.30pm

"We are concerned that, by making the evidence simply the “appearance” of a breach of copyright, the bar is being set too low."

"internet service providers and consumers need to have confidence that when an allegation is made it is not on a spurious basis"