My Lords, Amendment 28DZA would introduce a provision into the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 that changes the legal status of rights management information attached to digital material. This would make internet service providers responsible for ensuring any rights management information contained in metadata is recognised and acted upon. I have sympathy with creators whose wishes about the use of their material, expressed through metadata, are not always complied with. There are already well-established methods to control automated use of material posted online—for example, the use of robots dot text files to prevent crawling of websites by search engines. I was grateful for the technical insight on this from the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, who I suspect knows a lot more about this than my good self.
Internet service providers are already responsible for removing infringing material when it is brought to their attention. This is in keeping with other areas of law, where we do not expect carriers of information to be held liable for the lawfulness of that information. The approach suggested in the amendment would require all aggregators, indexers and other automated hosts online to develop systems to read metadata and comply with any conditions. As noble Lords will understand, this would be no small task. It would also replicate the efforts of a number of industry-led initiatives in this area, which are making progress. These include the Automated Content Access Protocol project, and work by the industry-led digital copyright exchange to look at the related issue of automated metadata stripping.
Government have considered the amendment carefully but do not consider that legislative change is the right step at this time. Moving on to Amendment 28DZD, noble Lords will be aware that the Government have announced their intention to bring forward legislation to introduce or update a number of copyright exceptions. A new exception to allow limited use of copyright works for parody, caricature or pastiche is part of that work. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, is therefore going in the same direction as the Government’s policy. Rather than amend the Bill to achieve it, I suggest that it would be better to wait for the introduction of a parody exception, with the other proposed changes to copyright exceptions, in due course.
The Government have already committed to publish draft regulations later in the year, including provisions on this subject, for technical review by any interested parties. This will be an important opportunity to hear from experts, including in this House, to ensure that the regulations will have the desired effect. I would like to pick up on a point emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, concerning secondary legislation. To clarify, we believe that exceptions to copyright that are explicitly permitted by the copyright directive may be introduced into UK law by means of Section 2.2 of the European Communities Act. The Hargreaves changes to copyright exceptions announced in December 2012 will be introduced by secondary legislation under the European Communities Act and not under the power in Clause 66 of the Bill. Our intention is to publish draft regulations for public comment in the spring. Government have considered the amendment carefully, but I hope that in light of the above, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, will feel able to withdraw this amendment.