Infringe copyright and lose your assets
Following intense lobbying by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America, the US House of Representatives approved the Pro-Intellectual Property Act, which mandates stricter enforcement and penalties for copyright infringement, by a vote of 410 to 10.
“We applaud the members of the House of Representatives for passing the Pro-IP Act,” said MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman. “It will strengthen our nation’s economy and generate more jobs for American workers by bolstering protections for intellectual property.”
If approved by the Senate and signed by President Bush, the act will establish a new copyright enforcement division in the Department of Justice and a new federal copyright enforcement “czar” responding to the president, with the power to seize property from copyright infringers.
That’s a big if. Although the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Rep. John Conyers, the bill’s sponsor, unanimously approved the legislation, the Department of Justice (DOJ) strongly criticised it as unnecessary and disruptive. Since MPAA and RIAA money goes mainly to the Democratic Party, President Bush has nothing to lose by vetoing the bill.
“It will disrupt important relationships within the criminal division and will make intradepartmental IP coordination more difficult,” said the DOJ representative. “Close collaboration between the IP division and the cyber crime laboratory could be jeopardized if the IP enforcement component were split off from computer crime and placed into a separate division.”
William Patry, Google’s senior counsel on copyright, questioned the validity of the act in his blog last December. He cited a lecture on “The Insatiable Appetite for Intellectual Property Rights” by the UK’s leading intellectual property authority, Sir Hugh Laddie.
“Where IP rights perform their function of advancing the sciences or arts, they should be encouraged to do so,” said Sir Hugh. “Where or to the extent that they do not, they have no justification and the normal discipline of competition should prevail. The gluttony which has resulted in the growth of completely unnecessary or excessively long IP rights undermines the system itself.”
