On June 15, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), US Chamber of Commerce, and the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy (CACP) announced an ambitious agenda to convince Congress and the White House to "transform the enforcement of U.S. intellectual property rights laws."
"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton said. "Add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft to fraud, to burglary, bank robbing, all of it costs the country $16 billion a year—but intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions a year."
The coalition includes pharmaceutical companies as well as the record and film industries—and no doubt many other industries among the "more than 300 associations and businesses that make up the CACP."
"American innovation, jobs, and consumer health and safety are being hijacked by organized counterfeiting and piracy crooks, and law enforcement resources are inadequate to stop them," said Tom Donohue, president and CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce. "Intellectual property theft is seen as a low-risk, high-reward crime in America and it is time to put an end to this by dedicating the law enforcement resources at all levels to put these networks out of business."
At a press conference on Capitol Hill, the Chamber of Commerce and the CACP presented detailed recommendations to effectively address the growing problem of counterfeiting. The agenda outlines six specific goals: 1) increasing resources at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice; 2) strengthening enforcement at the borders; 3) toughening penalties; 4) improving federal government coordination; 5) reforming civil and judicial processes; and 6) educating consumers.
Stereophile believes in copyright—we copyright our magazine and our recordings, after all. Further, we believe that importing counterfeit (pirated) products into the country is dangerous (vide diethylene glycol–contaminated toothpaste). Issues of safety and fairness are important.
But we're alarmed by the lack of concrete legislative goals in the CACP's broad (and self-described) aggressive campaign. As Content Agenda's Paul Sweeting pointed out in a June 14 editorial, the agenda "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." This means that a single, comprehensive solution is unlikely—and that pork, territorial disputes, and interdepartmental rivalries will probably deliver fangless Frankenlegislation designed to not irritate powerful entities, even if they are responsible for flooding us with counterfeited products.
Think we're paranoid? We recommend you read Cory Doctorow's June 11Information Week essay "How Hollywood, Congress, and DRM Are Beating Up the American Economy", which describes how the US's decision to sign the 1995 WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) killed American manufacturing by eliminating tariffs on manufactured goods to signatories in exchange for agreeing to protect American intellectual property laws.
Isn't the US one of the leading producers of infotainment in the world? Shouldn't we be doing pretty well out of the deal? Perhaps we would, if many of the TRIPS signatories actually enforced those laws. Instead, Doctorow points out, "signing onto those laws doesn't mean they'll enforce the laws...With the monthly Russian per capita GDP hovering at $200, it's just not plausible that Russians are going to start paying $15 for a CD, nor is it likely that they'll stop listening to music until their economy picks up." And then there's China.
Call us pessimists if you must, but we think simplistic solutions to complex problems court failure. As laudable as some of the CACP's goals are, we'll reserve judgment until it provides us with an actual plan.
