MPAA, others call for new anti-piracy campaign
Industry groups lobby Congress, White House for more enforcement
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 6/14/2007
JUNE 14 | WASHINGTON—The Motion Picture Assn. of America is joining forces with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a diverse collection of other industry groups to press Congress and the White House on an ambitious agenda to bolster enforcement of anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting laws.
Glickman
At a Capitol Hill news conference here today, MPAA head Dan Glickman shared the podium with representatives from the Recording Industry Assn. of America, the National Assn. of Manufacturers and the pharmaceuticals industry, as well as the Chamber, to unveil a six-point program that, if enacted, would amount to a major realignment of federal law enforcement efforts.
“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.”
Cotton is spearheading the new effort, christened the “Campaign to Protect America,” as chairman of the newly formed Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy.
The Coalition claims to represent more than 300 businesses and associations and has begun reaching out to organized labor on grounds that counterfeiting and piracy are threats to American jobs.
“The motion picture industry employs over a million people in this country, and most of them are not high-priced stars,” Glickman said. “Most of them are blue-collar workers, or craft workers, who are just trying to make a decent living.”
Unlike previous anti-piracy lobbying efforts, the new campaign is aimed less at defining new crimes afflicting particular industries than at elevating enforcement of existing copyright, patent, trademark and trade secret laws to the top of the public policy agenda.
“Part of the problem is that the policy approach up to now has been sector by sector,” Cotton said. “This is not about addressing problems in a particular sector. This is a major issue of public policy that affects our entire economy.”
The campaign’s six-point agenda includes:
- increasing investigative and enforcement resources at DHS and DOJ, including dedicated, institutionalized IP resources in U.S. attorneys offices;
- strengthening enforcement of counterfeiting laws at U.S. borders;
- increasing penalties for trafficking in counterfeit and pirated goods;
- improving federal coordination of IP enforcement efforts;
- reforming civil and judicial processes to combat organized criminal trafficking; and
- consumer education.
The group also supports the creation of a new IP enforcement coordinator within the White House.
“The benchmark of what we’re asking other companies to do to enforce intellectual property rights is what we do in this country,” Cotton said. “We want to make it clear that it’s a priority at the highest levels.”
Though the group has broad support across a diverse group of industry sectors, it faces difficult political challenges in enacting its program.
The program crosses jurisdictional boundaries among many different congressional committees and would affect the budgets and priorities of multiple federal agencies, each of which undergoes its own appropriations process.
In deference to those potential conflicts, the coalition is not promoting a single, omnibus piece of legislation to address all of its concerns, Cotton said. Instead, it will work on different pieces of its agenda with different committees before seeking specific appropriations for specific departments.
“We’re having intensive consultations with the leadership in Congress, and we’ll be consulting closely with the appropriate committee chairman to try to put the agenda into the appropriate legislative vehicles,” Cotton said.
