While Canadians tremble with anticipation at the arrival of new copyright legislation, the Americans are doing the same. Again.
And while we’re concerned that our new legislation might be even more imbalanced than the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Americans are preparing to toughen up their 10-year-old DMCA to make the penalties for copyright infringement even more stringent.
The U.S. House of Representatives, in a spirit of bipartisanship, on Wednesday introduced a bill that will increase civil penalties for copyright infringement, strengthen criminal enforcement, and create a new federal agency charged with bringing about a national and international copyright crackdown. The bill, called the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act, or PRO-IP, was introduced by John Conyers, the chairman of the U.S. House judiciary committee.
This means that the U.S. government agrees with major copyright holders, such as the Recording Industry Association of America, who emerged victorious some weeks ago after suing a single mother from Minnesota for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa. The jury awarded the RIAA $222,000.
And PRO-IP works on the premise that such verdicts are not enough.
The new legislation would make it easier to obtain maximum penalties for repeat offenders; the current 10-year prison term for repeat offenders will stay, but be toughened by removing the low-end limit that the repeat offender must have distributed at least 10 copyrighted works within six months. In other words, it will no longer matter how many songs a repeat offender posts after an initial conviction, the authorities will go for the maximum sentence.
The U.S. bill also seeks to create a new federal bureaucracy called the White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (WHIPER), whose chief would be appointed by the president and whose authority would extend to pressing other countries it identifies as IP violators. There would be 10 “intellectual property attaches” placed into U.S. embassies around the world.
And so it appears that not only is the U.S. Congress crafting intellectual property legislation that seeks to protect large corporate interests while leaving smaller ones to thrash about helplessly, they are doing it with the aim of enforcing its own laws in other countries, justified as complying with the World Intellectual Property Organization's treaties. It’s the same old argument — the Americans are giving themselves a mandate to “protect American interests” in the rest of the world.
But I don't think it's that simple.
The PRO-IP bill does something else that previous legislation has only hinted at: That it's not simply a matter of governments on both sides of the border bending to the demands of their corporate citizens. In fact, the governments' demonstrable lack of interest in public input to the intellectual property issue shows that legislators are as much leading the forces of tougher intellectual property rights as they are following them.
Which begs the question: What's in it for governments?
So far, we have wasted most of our outrage on the recording industry, whose comical and ham-fisted attacks on single mothers and dotty grandparents have become a lightning rod for accusations of corporate bullying. We haven't been looking at why governments have seemed so hell bent on helping them do it.
My theory is that laws like this are designed to fundamentally change the nature of what we make and produce. Soon, the developed world will no longer be able to behave as it always has in the global marketplace in terms of the goods and services we sell — as we improve our economic well-being we can no longer compete with cheap labour from other countries. Instead, we will start to count intellectual property as our primary domestic product. We will leave manufacturing of our goods to other countries, and use the IP argument to shut down imports of products made more cheaply elsewhere.
No, Washington and Ottawa aren't being bullied by lobbyists. They're actually leading the lobbyists into the future, one in which intellectual property will be the coin of the realm.
