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The Great Stonewall of China - May 14, 2007

Senior Justice Department officials said Monday they hope to have productive “cop-to-cop” talks about intellectual property enforcement with their Chinese counterparts later this month, despite heightened tension around the issue since the U.S. Trade Representative filed a formal complaint against Beijing with the World Trade Organization last month over lax attention to IP crimes.

“We've seen some encouraging signs that [the Chinese] are willing to keep the two issues separate,” a DOJ official said in a background briefing for reporters. “The fact that we're still dialogging is a hopeful sign.”

Dialogging? Well, I guess that's a hopeful sign.

Major copyright owners are certainly hoping that the USTR’s action, which they generally applauded, does not backfire on the industry by prompting the Chinese to freeze future cooperation on enforcement, lest they appear to acknowledge their efforts to date have been lacking.

Chinese cops may still be dialogging, but Chinese trade officials were fighting mad over the complaint, saying it would harm U.S./China trade relations.

Not a lot of dialogging there.

More dialogging also isn't likely to ease growing pressure on American trade and law enforcement officials from U.S. copyright groups for a more comprehensive approach to global piracy.

At an earlier briefing for reporters Monday, NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton, who also heads the U.S Chamber of Commerce Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, said he met privately with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez to press them to enlist other industry sectors in the fight against piracy.

“In the banking industry, for instance, we impose responsibility on banks to know their international customers and to monitor certain kinds of transactions,” such as those that may indicate illegal money laundering, he said.

A similar set of monitoring obligations on industry sectors that may unwittingly be involved in the movement of counterfeit DVDs and CDs, or the movement of funds that facility such counterfeiting, may be needed to effectively combat the problem, Cotton suggested.

He also pressed for additional “specialized resources” at U.S. law enforcement agencies to pursue piracy cases.

The senior DOJ officials said the attorney general “noted Mr. Cotton's comments,” but did not include a request for those additional “specialized resources” in draft legislation sent to Congress Monday, the actual occasion for all the briefing.

Instead, the proposed Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007” would increase penalties for counterfeiting and repeat offenders, expand restitution and forfeiture provisions to cover DMCA violations and criminalize the exporting and transshipping of copyright-infringing goods.

The bill, which does not yet have a sponsor on Capitol Hill, would create a new crime of “attempting” to distribute counterfeit goods, similar to the intent to distribute standard for illegal drugs.

 

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