On Monday, I wondered what NBC-Universal CEO Jeff Zucker meant when he said that a new bill would be introduced in the House of Representatives this week that gives content suppliers greater control over their intellectual property. Now we know.
Yesterday, a bi-partisan group of lawmakers introduced in the House the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property, or PRO IP, Act of 2007. The bill stiffens penalites for copyright infringement, including much-hated P2P file-sharing, beefs up criminal enforcement of copyright violations and creates a new federal agency to police potential efforts that can serve to infringe on copyrights.
PRO-IP boosts current penalties for compilation infringement from $30,000 to whatever the law will bear. Courts would be able to grant "multiple awards" of statutory damages in compliation infringement cases.
The legislation also lowers the criminal threshold for repeat infringer penalites. Right now anyone who infringes $1,000 worth of material is a criminal under the law and PRO-IP keeps in place a 10-year prison term for repeat offenders. But, it eliminates another level of qualification for prison, namely that the infringer distributed at least 10 copyrighted works within 180 days.
The bill also allows the Justice Department to seize and sell computers used in the authorized distribution of copyrighted content.
More importantly, the bill creates a new arm of the federal government, the White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative, or WHIPER, whose head will be appointed by the White House and confirmed by the Senate. The bill also creates a new unit in the Justice Deparment, the Intellectual Property Enforcement Division, which will have a $25 million annual operating budget.
Although piracy of intellectual content is a big problem, this is kind of crazy, no? Just what this country needs, right? A whole new way to use taxpayer monies to help Hollywood and the record companies protect their existing business models.
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:24 AM|Comments(1)
Cynthia - glad you covered this, it's a very important topic!
Posted by: Jeremy Toeman at December 7, 2007 12:17 PM
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