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Team America: World IP Police - October 4, 2007

Media Wonk wandered into a Capitol Hill panel discussion Thursday on Policy Approaches to Intellectual Property Enforcement and the Impact of Trade Agreements (I know, it's quite a life).

Sponsored by the Property Rights Alliance, yet another group seeking to align U.S. government policy with the business interests of U.S. companies wherever they may roam, the panel featured the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Intellectual Property Victoria Espinel, U.S. Coordinator for International Intellectual Property Enforcement Chris Israel, and representatives from the movie and music industries.

The presence of the gentleman from the record industry was apparently a state secret, because he put his comments off the record, which was definitely a new one in Media Wonk's looong experience with panel discussions.

The on the record stuff picked up on a theme sounded earlier in the week by MPAA CEO Dan Glickman at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Anti-Counterfeiting and Piracy Summit, to wit, that foreigners apparently sometimes take offense at heavy-handed efforts to enforce U.S. patents and copyrights in their countries.

"There is an expectation on that part of other countries that when you put these issues on the table, and they do commit resources to IP enforcement, there is an expectation that there will be some upside for them, that there will be increased investment or some other benefit," Israel said. "And there's a sense in some of those countries that we haven't really delivered on that, that they haven't gotten the investment. So the challenge [for U.S. trade negotiators] is, how do you demonstrate to other countries that there's upside to IP enforcement?"

U.S. pressure "only goes so far," Espinel acknowledged. "I think it's also important to be supportive of efforts by other countries to become innovators, so they begin to develop a stake in the global IP system themselves. Some people say, well why should we encourage competition to U.S., but I think that's wrong. The more of a stake they have in the IP system, the less of a 'U.S. issue' it is, the better it is for the U.S."

Supporting innovation in China or Brazil, of course, is not the business of American movie studios and record labels, and does little for them in the short term. I can't quote the gentleman from the record industry because his comments were off the record. But suffice it to say he has little patience for whiny third-world countries who think they should get something back for enforcing U.S. copyrights.

"When I travel in other countries I always try to buy a local [pirated] disc," MPAA executive VP for worldwide government policy Greg Frazier said. "Then when I go in to meet with a Chinese official, I can say, see, this isn't just a U.S. issue. It's a Chinese problem, too."







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