WHIPER Snapper

There are a number of arguments to be made that copyright infringement penalties are too harsh. Some members of congress, however, feel they need to be stiffened up. The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (“PRO IP“) Act of 2007 (H.R. 4279) would significantly harshen penalties for would-be intellectual property infringers, create a new Intellectual Property Enforcement Division in the Department of Justice, and create the new ambassador level post of the White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (“WHIPER“.)

The increased penalties will do little to nothing to reduce infringing activities. Despite the Recording Industry Association of America‘s aggressive, high-profile approach to litigation and the huge awards extracted from people of little means, file sharing appears to be here to stay. (This week RIAA threatened 22 Universities with legal action.) Ignoring for the moment whether we as a society should be encouraging for-profit industries to siphon money from educational institutions, unregistered copyrights (the vast majority) would not benefit from these increased penalties and will continue to be essentially unprotected by U.S. law. Unlike the vast majority of countries in the world, we’ll continue to have a two-tiered system favoring large content holders. Not so PRO-IP.

However, the bill is not uniformly bad. The WHIPER is a great idea that should yield real benefits to the U.S. economy. The IP Enforcement Representative would coordinate U.S. IP enforcement policy by chairing an interagency advisory committee composed of senior representatives from the Department of Justice, Patent and Trademark Office, Office of the United States Trade Representative, and the United States Copyright Office. The IP Representative also would create a joint strategic plan to eliminate counterfeit and pirated goods from the international supply chain and to establish international standards and policies for the effective protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Perhaps the IP Representative will notice the U.S. is one of the few countries where copyright registration is required in order to enforce your rights. A requirement that few small authors understand or know about. Eliminating this requirement would be the biggest step that Congress could take to strengthen and inject uniform fairness into our copyright system.

Maybe that’ll show up in the markup.