The Lords pass Digital Economy Bill

Peter Mandelson’s increasingly controversial Digital Rights Bill has been approved by The House of Lords and now looks set for a pre-election approval at the hands of The Commons.

The decision comes despite the last-minute inclusion of measures proposed by the Liberal Democrats that will grant courts the power to demand that ISPs block access to sites deemed guilty of sharing copyrighted material.

The amendment was slammed by a number of UK business leaders and digital freedom campaigners, mainly due to the lack of any appeals process.

Pirate Party UK spokesperson Andrew Robinson told the BBC that: The public will not respect a law that was quite literally written by the record industry, for the record industry. As it stands, the bill is fatally flawed, and fundamentally unjust.”

An addition to the bill that would have granted Government the power to amend copyright law without new legislation had previously been blocked by The Lords.