Digital Britain

My Lords, I support the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and would like to ask the Minister a couple of questions as a result. Does he realise that royalties usually go to the copyright holders and not to the artists? It does not encourage innovation; it encourages making money out of back catalogues. It therefore stifles a lot of new stuff done by teenagers such as mash-ups, where they use backing tracks, put them together with other stuff and put them up on YouTube. Who will get sued? Where is the copyright and who is the infringer? The Government are going to form a rights agency, which will be a government body that enforces civil infringements. It is a bit of a departure for the Government to start putting their own body into enforcement; Parliament should debate whether that is a good principle. I should explain: peer-to-peer file-sharing is not illegal—we should make that clear. To find out when it is illegal, ISPs will have to look at the content of those communications. It is like opening people’s mail. That will be quite a step forward, since people are trying to hit certain other companies for doing that very thing to try to benefit people. The Government should look carefully before they turn that into legislation. Bandwidth reduction could bankrupt SMEs. If children ride on the back of their parents’ SME bandwidth, how will you respond to that when they cannot respond to government inquiries? Does the Minister not feel that this is the time for us to be moving into the 21st century? Strong copyright can inhibit innovation. We should look at proposals that were debated at the Digital Britain conference. The Government should simplify IPs, particularly for small businesses. We should look at the Creative Commons. We need to change business models because of digital copying rather than trying to enforce stricter copyright restrictions, entrenching a dinosaur method that belongs to the last century.