Clause 8 is rather long - well, the debate on it is, anyway - so I'll focus solely on Panorama: Are the Net Police Coming for You, the BBC programme shown on Monday night. I've watched it, and since I've been reviewing all the debates, I figured it'd make sense to do the same to this.

I wasn't 100% convinced by their ham-fisted method of explaining the finer points of the Digital Economy Bill. It began in pretty bullish fashion, claiming that "if you're a persistent downloader, the government is threatening to cut you off", which is the same as saying "if you commit a crime, the government is threatening to put you in prison for life". From what I've gathered from listening to the discussions in the Lords, the emphasis has been overwhelmingly on protecting people's rights, not "threatening" anything. I don't think they're giving the government enough credit here. Besides, as they mention later, the Bill has "cross-party support", so it's not just the Labour government who want to see this Bill through.

Anyway, let's move on. The focus in this show is purely on file-sharing of music - and only music. Nothing else is covered. Naturally, they got Radio 1's Jo Whiley to do the 'investigation', if you can call it that, since I imagine she holds currency with the 13-25 year-old demographic who like music. As usual, though, the descriptions of anything remotely technical come off sounding even more clueless than the 50 year-old men I've been listening to in the Lords.

At the very least, they pushed all points of view, from musicians and industry people, as well as the great unwashed. For the latter, they decided to watch an "ordinary household" - that is, a middle-class family with ridiculous names for their children (Posey? Seriously?). Anyway, the kids are big downloaders, of course, and the adults have no idea about computers, so at least that part sounds accurate. Thus, they employ the services of an IT sleuth, who can find out what you're doing online. Now, I thought "IT sleuth" meant that he would use special programs to monitor what you do, and tear through the hard drive's sectors for deleted stuff, but no.

In fact, this guy just had a look around someone's hard drive, and says he's got films, TV shows and so on. Did you really need to be a super sleuth to click 'Start', 'Search', and '.avi'? Seriously? You needed a "Forensic Computer Investigator" to do that? Just to rub it in, they ask him where he gets his stuff, and he replies with, surprise surprise, The Pirate Bay, arguably the most well-known Bittorrent tracker in the world. So, helpfully, the cameraman gets a close-up on the URL for... piratebay.com. Which, in case you don't know, is a different site. Still, this internet's all the same, innit?

After a silly rapper raps about how it's terrible to download, Stephen Timms MP comes on to explain the Bill, but, struggling for an analogy, he says that "just as if you're using electricity you need to use it in lawful means, so with broadband". Could someone explain an 'unlawful' use of electricity? If you electrocute your parents, I guess that's 'unlawful'. There then follows a little animation for the thickies out there.

But after getting the differing opinions of musical talking heads, our super sleuth Keith has "found something interesting on the family computers". Hands up if the first word that came to mind was 'PORN'. Well, you're wrong. There's "a piece of software called Bittorrent" on the computer. How'd you find that, super sleuth? Did you go in their 'Program Files' folder and look for the most common method of sharing files? Or typed 'torrent' in the aforementioned search box? Seriously? Forensic expert Keith? Sigh. Maybe I'm being too harsh, but it seems like we need an 'expert' in every documentary, even if they're nothing of the sort, just so we have someone to trust with these matters. When quizzed on the existence of uTorr... sorry, 'Bittorrent' - better keep it generic here - the mother comes out with the classic line: "They're not downloading porn or anything, so it's just music, so it seems to be okay". Finally, someone mentioned the p-word.

They bring up the dreaded 'throttling', a term which I find unsavoury given the proximity to 'strangling'. The mum of the family thinks she'd be affected "massively" by this, because she needs to get email at home. Yes, because cutting you down to 50kb/s would stop your email from coming through. Something tells me the purpose of throttling your connection is to stop the big transfers of films and music, not a sodding Word document. But I digress. Throttling or cutting off your internets is "controversial", which it should be, of course. I like the revelations by Ms Whiley that people do banking, shopping and "even socialising" via the web. Yes, even socialising. It's not as if social networking sites are a cultural phenomenon at the moment or anything.

I think I'm getting a little petty, so I'll thunder on and get this over with. I really like TalkTalk's mischievous video mocking the music industry's attempts at stopping this sort of thing, and go to YouTube if you want to see the whole video. I like Billy Bragg's simple equation for how artists can make money with file-sharing going on: "If you can find 5,000 people anywhere in the world (because of the internet) who are willing to spend a tenner on you in the space of a year, you've got the basis of a career". It's a great point, as £50,000 a year would be a great salary for most of us, and any argument that losing money through file-sharing "stifles creativity" is bollocks, frankly. Thing is, when musicians are used to the high life, they'll be damned if they should give it up.

Another rapper comes along and says that the Featured Artists Coalition is a bunch of rich musicians who've already made it, so they should be ignored. Pop twat Louis Walsh says that, whatever your genre, "you need the big machine behind you". Thanks, but no thanks. They then made the valid point that people who download a lot also spend a lot too, so the industry probably makes more money from the evil pirates than from your average Joe.

Back to the techie stuff, though, as our man Keith sits in a car outside the house and 'hacks' their wi-fi. This is a concern, of course, but the debates on the Bill have made this point clear, that it's more about educating people on how to keep their wi-fi secure, as guys sitting in cars using wi-fi is hardly a huge problem at the moment. A couple of people then complain that lawyers representing companies have accused them of downloading and demanded money - something that was also debated and the consensus is obviously that this is an awful thing to do. So, how do you find the evil pirates? IP address. Can you fake your IP address? Of course you can. They don't use the word 'proxy', even though that word isn't a purely techie one as it's used for other things - they simply say 'anonymity system'. Jo Whiley also points out that websites to get stuff from include "the Pirate Bay, Bittorrent and LimeWire". Well, despite the fact that Bittorrent is a protocol, and LimeWire is a program that uses that protocol, you're nearly right. I know I'm getting petty again, but it's like saying "some different travel companies are EasyJet, petrol and motorcycles" - it sounds silly.

Finally, our Jo's "astonished" at the stuff the kids have been downloading, including some new bands, "the kind of stuff that I'm really into". Okay, Jo, we know you're 'down with the kids, innit', but you don't have to sound desperate.

In summary, it had a sprinkling of good points mixed in with a lot of stupid. Never was it mentioned that the Bill actually has nothing to do with DOWNloading files, but is specifically concerned with making files available for UPload. This is why, thoughout the debate (and on this blog) there have been mentions of 'illegal file-sharers', not 'downloaders'. Companies don't like downloading, of course, but the Bill is concerned with uploading to others, via Bittorrent for example. If someone stuck an album, film or whatever onto one of the many file-hosting websites, it's impossible for anyone to know that you got the files from there. So, you could stop the Bittorrent uploaders, one by one, but file-hosting sites continue to thrive.

I hope you enjoyed my review, and as a result of it I hope you stick with me for news on this Bill, because documentary makers clearly don't have a clue what they're talking about.