Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Lord Gordon of Strathblane and Lord Foster of Bath

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Thursday 2nd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane]

Very briefly and anecdotally, I had a briefing session with Sky and the Motion Picture Association and, as somebody who is in the wrong age group for being able to use these kinds of things, I was absolutely appalled at how easy it is to get hold of a pirated film. I agree with the wording of the amendments; they are sufficiently vague that they will, hopefully, future-proof us. If they were too detailed, we would run the risk of having something that the criminal classes would find it all too easy to evade. I urge the Minister to give this consideration.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, will be brief, but I think it is important that we keep pointing out the number of problems that are currently not being addressed. My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones has given some figures, as have the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others, but it is worth recalling, for example, that in the second quarter of 2016 alone, no fewer than 51 million pieces of film and TV content were accessed illegally online, according to the Intellectual Property Office.

The case has already been made that this is damaging very seriously the commercial ability of the legal providers of content. We know from another survey that one in five people who are using this illegal approach has now either completely cancelled or cut down their subscription to legal platforms. As has been pointed out, any attempt at enforcement has so far found itself in difficulty because of the inadequacy of the existing legislation—hence the call in both Amendments 71B and 79A that we put in place a fit and proper enforcement regime and definitions of specific offences.

The noble Lord pointed to the briefing he had from Sky—and no doubt he will have heard from Sky about the number of times that it has been able to identify illegal activity going on, whether it is with local trading standards or the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, but has had difficulty taking prosecutions through to the final stages. People have got away when perhaps, if we had had fit and proper legislation as is being proposed here, that would not have been the case.

Sky gave one example:

“Following an investigation … where live sport was being streamed and made available on IPTV boxes via two websites, a referral was made to PIPCU in September 2014. Search and seizures were made in July 2015 … the pirate was remanded in custody, he was later released following an appeal. Two years later, the pirate has re-opened his site with the same name but moved from .net to .biz with the Crown Prosecution Service still considering”—


how it might go about prosecution. It is for this sort of reason that we need these amendments, or something like them.