All Hail the Copyright Czar

Sam Gustin writes: By signing an aggressive copyright protection bill yesterday, President Bush has handed a victory to the powerful forces that lobbied for its passage: Hollywood, the recording industry, and major media companies currently battling what they see as the scourge of digital piracy.

But how much will the new law, the PRO-IP Act, actually do to combat digital piracy? Is it the silver bullet the music business needs to save an industry that is shrinking by hundreds of millions of dollars per year?

My answers: Not much, and no.

The bill, which triples copyright damages and gives the government the right to seize property used to commit intellectual property theft, e.g. laptops, is at the center of what Larry Lessig, the noted intellectual property lawyer, calls "the copyright wars."

Perhaps most controversially, the bill would also create a new "copyright czar" to oversee the nation's efforts to combat piracy. The Justice Department actually opposed that provision, arguing that a copyright czar would undermine its authority.

Writing on TechCrunch, Eric Schonfeld quipped that the new copyright czar would likely do as much good as the president's drug czar has done in combating narcotics traffic and use.

I agree.

And that's the real problem with these types of authoritarian laws. They further drive black-market activity underground. For nearly a decade the recording industry and law enforcement groups have been waging a series of running battles against illegal music file-sharers. And yet such digital file-sharing remains rampant, by some estimates, ten times as large as the legal online music market.

"The war on peer-to-peer file-sharing is a failure," Lessig wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week. "After a decade of fighting, the law has neither slowed file sharing, nor compensated artists. We should sue not kids, but for peace, and build upon a host of proposals that would assure that artists get paid for their work, without trying to stop 'sharing.'"

Pro-business groups hailed the bill's passage, which they describe as necessary to combat criminal activity that costs $250 billion and 750,000 jobs per year, despite the fact that those figures have been thoroughly discredited.

"By becoming law, the PRO-IP Act sends the message to IP criminals everywhere that the U.S. will go the extra mile to protect American innovation," said Tom Donahue, president and chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, called the bill a "shining example of a bicameral, bipartisan effort to advance legislation to protect our consumers, jobs and businesses from intellectual property piracy and counterfeiting."

Mitch Bainwol, head of the Recording Industry Association of America described the bill as "music to the ears of all those who care about strengthening American creativity and jobs."

Opponents of the bill said it simply adds more ammunition to the quixotic campaign to crack-down on digital piracy.

"There's already lots and lots of penalties for copyright violations," said Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge, a D.C.-based activist group which opposed the bill. "They've got all the tools they need."

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Laura Rich is a co-founder of Recessionwire, which provides news, advice, perspective and humor about the recession and the recovery.