This week Victoria Espinel, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, submitted her long-anticipated 2010 Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement to the President and to Congress (PDF, 65 pages).
Intellectual property (IP) has become a controversial topic in the past few years, but thankfully there was very little controversy in the Joint Strategic Plan. It seems that one of the few truly non-partisan policy issues today is the recognition of the importance of intellectual property protection to our nation’s economy.
The job of enforcement of IP laws rightly falls to government. It’s not really the job of government to “protect” intellectual property products—under the law the owner of the work has to protect his own property rights. But it’s the government’s job to create a legal environment that makes it possible for rights holders to protect their property, and it’s the government’s job to enforce the law.
And enforcement ends up cutting across a surprisingly wide swath of government. Agencies involved in IP enforcement include not only the obvious ones, like the United States Patent Office (USPTO), but also the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Department of State, the United States Trade Representative, and the Copyright Office. You can see why a “coordinator” is necessary!
IPI long ago realized the importance of IP to the continued and expanded growth of the U.S. economy, which is why intellectual property policy is one of our key areas of policy concentration. And we were delighted to see our research on the impact of piracy and counterfeiting on the U.S. economy referenced several times in the 2010 Joint Strategic Plan.
In fact, according to the Plan: “The most frequently cited studies [on the loss of jobs and revenue to the U.S. economy due to intellectual property theft] were those from the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) . . .” (p. 52).
It’s important work, and it’s a not-terribly sexy way of defending jobs and economic growth in the U.S. economy. In fact, that’s why earlier this year IPI co-sponsored a conference in (of all places) Tanzania on counterfeiting, and will be co-sponsoring similar conferences later this year in the Caribbean and in Indonesia.
You can access IPI’s work on intellectual property policy through this link, or simply by going to www.ipi.org. Your job may depend on it—IP intensive industries account for nearly 60 percent of total U.S. exports.