Before Clause 9, Lord Lucas introduced an amendment to tackle insidious law firms such as ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons. These two firms are responsible for getting flimsy evidence of someone's guilt in sharing a copyrighted title, and harassing them for several hundred pounds. Lord Clement-Jones, a (former?) lawyer himself, was happy to join in the kicking of these guys, claiming they've even asked someone "how old their daughter is and what games console she has, when they have only a Nintendo DS", insisting that this "intrusion is unacceptable", which, of course, it is. There are no words to describe these law firms, but clearly they must be stopped, and it was nice to hear most people denounce them (as Lord Young of Norwood Green seemed to agree with the opinion of their behaviour during the following session, after receiving information about them - though being in government, he was not so explicit). In the midst of all this, Tory Lord Howard of Rising revealed, surprisingly, that he knows that BBC licence fee letters are very unfriendly, as he has "rather a good collection of them, actually".

Clause 9 : Progress reports. This was a relatively short debate. There were some good points, however.

During a debate on Ofcom reviewing its plans for the future based on whether the new regulations are encouraging people to download legally, Lord Lucas, a very liberal Tory as far as I can see, made a wonderful plea. He said that "reducing the level of illegal downloading is not in itself an absolute good. If we reduce the level of illegal downloading, all we will do is to reduce a lot of people's enjoyment of music and films. If we do not at the same time increase the level of revenue to the copyright owners, we will do nothing for them. We will produce a widespread bad, but no good. Just depriving people of something is not a good thing to do. It is good only if we can get more revenue for the copyright holders". He made it clear that the position on this Bill should not be of punishing file-sharers, but of benefiting the copyright holders. The Earl of Erroll agreed in a later debate, saying that unless the regulations help the rights holders, the law will be "acting like the traditional puritan who has a haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying himself".

There were a couple more tiny discussions before passing the clause unamended.

Clause 9 passed - no amendments

I'll leave Clause 10 till tomorrow. I've already written my post, but it's very long, so I'll add it to the site tomorrow. Incidentally, the Bill has currently passed to the House of Commons, so I still have a lot of catching up to do.