Further to my blog post early today on the Right2Link campaign thanks to Andrew Smith for an update on Lord Lucas’ proposed amendment (292BA) to the Digital Economy bill seeking the “protection of the right to link to publicly available information on the internet.”

In a debate in the House of Lords last night lasting almost six hours Lord Lucas argued the case for fair usage:

“We ought to take the clear view that the breadth of knowledge on the web should be available to all, and that commercial interests on the web should be confined to relatively small corners of it and not allowed to take over vast swathes of it. In most cases, a search engine taking a small extract of copyright material-what is on a search engine is copyright material-should be regarded as fair usage and a proper part of the way in which the citizen and the copyright holder interact.”

Lord Lucas subsequently withdrew the amendment following a commitment from Lord Davies of Oldham to provide written assurances on behalf of the Government:

“The Government want-and the noble Lord did say how important it was for us to have a definition of what we wanted from the web-web users to continue to be able to use the web freely for legitimate uses, but we do not want to condone or to encourage copyright infringement. Those are the principles which underpin our approach to the web. Once again, I know that I am craving the noble Lord’s indulgence with such a sparse response to some intensive arguments, which he mercifully at this late hour kept to a few well-chosen words. We will write to him on all those amendments and I know very well that if he is less than satisfied with the responses on that very mildly-presented point, we may hear more from him. We will certainly bear that in mind in the letters that we write to him.”