Last year, in the US, a law known as PRO-IP was signed into law. It mandated the creation of a Justice Department position responsible for the enforcement of intellectual property rights. The second part of that law, requesting comments about IP enforcement issues from the public, is now underway.
Specifically, they are looking for “written submissions from the public identifying the costs to the U.S. economy resulting from infringement of intellectual property rights, both direct and indirect, including any impact on the creation or maintenance of jobs.”
Comments should be emailed to the Office of Management & Budget (intellectualproperty@omb.eop.gov) and must be received by March 24.
Comments received by the deadline will be published on a government webpage, so make sure you don’t include anything you wouldn’t want available to the general public.
PRO-IP (the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008) is a thinly veiled excuse to divert government resources to the entertainment industry’s war against P2P file sharing.
The rationale for such a law is based on the flawed premise that file sharing is responsible for billions of dollars suddenly vanishing from the US economy and the loss of nearly a million jobs.
Result for: us government
In January, the US Government postponed the mandatory DTV transition from February until June 12th, as it was clear that over 6 million households were not ready.
Today, the federal Department of Commerce has said that if you are still unready and have not applied for a converter box coupon, you should do so no later than Monday, or risk having no TV signal by the time of the transition.
Every household can receive two $40 coupons to use towards the purchase of converter boxes, and more information about the coupons can be found at 888-DTV-2009 or www.DTV2009.gov.
As of May 10th, Nielsen estimated that there are still 3.3 million households not ready for the transition.
Result for: us government
It’s no secret that certain elements in the US Federal Government would like to see all copyright infringement criminalized and the Department of Justice used as an enforcement agency for intellectual property owners. What gets less publicity is the work by the office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) to similarly effect the law in other countries. Earlier this week the USTR’s office issued a press release declaring victory in one such case against China, but behind their celebration is actually a significant defeat.
Although the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreed with US claims that China isn’t living up to their obligation to protect foreign copyrights under the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The portion of the treaty in question requires that all participants at least criminalize willful commercial infringement of intellectual property.
Specifically, a WTO panel concluded that the US hadn’t profided any real evidence since it was all in the form of newspaper clippings. According to the WTO report, “the Panel does not ascribe any weight to the evidence in the press articles and finds that, even if it did, the information that these press articles contain is inadequate to demonstrate what is typical or usual in China for the purposes of the relevant treaty obligation.”
The report further admonished the US for substituting claims of bad behavior for evidence of specific wrong doing. The report says “A complaining party may not simply submit evidence and expect the panel to divine from it a claim of WTO-inconsistency. Nor may a complaining party simply allege facts without relating them to its legal arguments.”
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