Amidst the headline grabbing economic crisis a bipartisan group of senators, led by Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), is fighting to enact The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act (S.3325), to strengthen significantly our government’s effort to protect American innovation, creativity and our future economic growth.
The federal government has a critical role to play in intellectual property (IP) enforcement. Only the government can:
- bring criminal charges in cases of organized and prolific piracy and counterfeiting,
- conduct the investigations necessary to build and prove these cases,
- effectively engage our trading partners on behalf of U.S. rights holders and
- provide comprehensive leadership on a problem that has reached global scale and affects millions of Americans.
The proposal would improve copyright and trademark laws by toughening civil and criminal penalties, especially where counterfeiting threatens public health.
The number of federal IP cases has increased significantly in recent years, involving large, organized, multinational criminal operations that deal in everything from pirated software to fake Internet routers. Although this increase is noteworthy, IP cases still make up less than 1 percent of all federal criminal cases. New tools for law enforcement are crucial.
S. 3325 addresses a critical (and currently fragile) link in the enforcement chain by providing FBI agents, strategically placed within the Department of Justice and given state-of-the-art training and support, the authority to investigate and support cases of IP theft. The tools and capabilities would finally exist to take the fight to the criminals wherever they set up shop and however they might route their illicit products.
Further the importance of organization, leadership and accountability is emphasized by creating within the Executive Office of the President a post whose occupant would coordinate a far-reaching IP enforcement strategy to coordinate across many agencies of government.
Our economic future has been damaged enough lately—let’s hope Congress doesn’t hinder the engine of future growth and gets this one right.