Tim Walker: This Bill is the climax of a battle between web users and the music industry

While Westminster will be all a-Twitter with one political confrontation this week, the wider web will be just as focussed on another.

Lord Mandelson's Digital Economy Bill, including a controversial clause dealing with copyright theft and online piracy, is expected to pass tomorrow with the minimum of Commons scrutiny. It's the climax of a lengthy battle between web users, ultra-conscious of their digital rights, and an entertainment business that they see as unwilling to adapt to modern technological realities. Users have done more than merely tweet their discontent: tens of thousands complained to their MPs, and thousands more protested outside Parliament.

Clause 17 – the bit that deals specifically with copyright and piracy – was altered following the intervention of Conservative and Liberal peers. But even the impenetrable replacement clause reads as if written by legislators mostly concerned with keeping the traditional entertainment industry onside. The business secretary's bill has enjoyed three readings in the House of Lords, a reflection of both its importance and, perhaps, its opacity. Yet instead of asking MPs to pick through its dense parliamentary prose in detail, the Government is expected to rush it through in a matter of hours as part of the so-called "washing up" of outstanding legislation prior to the election. Only the Liberal Democrats and a lone Labour minister have suggested it might be better left for the next Parliament.

The Government insists, quite rightly, that Britain must be a digital leader to thrive in the future global economy; both Labour and the Tories promise to hook up the vast majority of UK citizens to super-fast broadband during the next decade. And yet the bill apparently allows internet service providers to suspend the connections of entire households just because one of the children downloaded the Cheryl Cole album and a couple of SpongeBob episodes. How are parents supposed to do the Ocado shop, let alone conduct the business that allows them to pay for it, if their internet access can be withdrawn at the whim of the ISPs and copyright-holders? How will their offspring do their homework?

OK, so that may be a worst-case scenario. Feargal Sharkey, chief of Music UK, has derided such talk as "scaremongering". Still, under Clause 18 ministers could also shut down entire websites seen to provide "access to copyright infringing material." Sites like Wikileaks, a forum for whistleblowers to leak sensitive information anonymously, would be in immediate danger. So too would YouTube and eBay. Hotels and cafés could be stripped of free Wi-Fi if businesses feared unwittingly breaking the law.

The friendly face of the music business online is Music Matters, a new campaign to encourage "ethical" music consumption. The industry collective behind it wants to differentiate legal music sites from illegal ones by assigning them a logo to demonstrate their legitimacy. This, at least, is some acknowledgement that, far from damaging music, the internet has enriched people's experience of it (and of film, and of any other form of copyrighted material) as well as giving formerly unheard-of opportunities to new artists in every medium.

Music matters to people now as much as it ever has, in that Radiohead or Lady Gaga matter to their supporters. The names EMI or Universal, however, may not concern them so much. And there surely ought to be sustainable business models – and satisfactory laws – for the entertainment industry that don't involve punishing its most enthusiastic fans.

As most of us understand instinctively when studying a movie poster, there's a hierarchy of sources for the favourable quotes that are plastered across them. A five-star review from a leading newspaper or film magazine probably tops the list. Then, depending on what sort of film it is, come Jonathan Ross, his brother Paul, the leading film bloggers, the women's glossies, and "Gemma, 26, from Merseyside" or some other random, impressionable member of the public. One review from somewhere near the bottom of this ranking adorns ads for the new animated children's film How To Train Your Dragon 3-D, which it describes as "A contender for the best dragon film ever made." Which leads me to wonder whether there are really enough dragon films to constitute a genre – and what, exactly, its competition might be. (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, by the way, doesn't count.)