PRO-IP backers hopeful on Senate action

The full Senate committee will hold a hearing tomorrow to examine enforcement issues, featuring testimony from the director of international affairs and trade for the Government Accountability Office, Dr. Loren Yager, as well as representatives from the Underwriters Laboratory, Johnson & Johnson and Gates Corporation.

Although the hearing is not intended to focus on any particular piece of legislation, PRO-IP supporters are hopeful the hearing will be the starting gun for moving an enforcement bill through the Senate.

“The hearing is a big step of starting the process of introducing a companion to PRO-IP in the Senate,” said Rick Cotton, general counsel for NBC Universal and chairman of the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, the leading force behind the PRO-IP Act. “We hope the committee leadership will move expeditiously on it.”

A spokeswoman for the Senate Judiciary Committee cautioned that tomorrow’s hearing is a preliminary step and that a companion bill to House version of PRO-IP may not emerge in the Senate quickly.

“Tomorrow’s hearing will address enforcement issues, but I’d stop short of saying there’s going to be a ‘companion bill’ at this point,” she said. “That implies a bill that would be very similar to the PRO-IP Act. But there are other enforcement bills out there that also need to be looked at.”

One of those other bills, the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act, was introduced last year by Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Ver.).

The Leahy bill covers some of the same territory as PRO-IP, but it doesn’t include a number of key provisions in the House bill, such as creating an IP enforcement coordinator within the White House and adding specialized dedicated enforcement resources to various law and customs enforcement agencies.

The most likely scenario is that the eventual Senate bill in incorporate elements of various proposed enforcement bills, including PRO-IP and the Leahy bill. If such a bill were to pass the Senate, it would then have to be reconciled with the House-passed PRO-IP Act before either could become law.