The mainstream media has focused on the substantive foreign policy credentials of Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), recently chosen by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to be his vice presidential candidate. This is appropriate, as it clearly is a major factor in Obama’s decision.

I view all things through a very parochial lens, however, copyright. And even though my undergraduate degree is in international relations, when I think of Joe Biden, I think of copyright. Specifically, Biden’s repeated promotion of copyright and artists’ rights.

Yes, Biden chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but for many years he held the gavel at Judiciary and he remains active on that committee. He’s a co-founder and co-chairman of the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus, where he ties his pro-IP viewpoints with his international perspective. An important annual product of the Caucus is its international watch list of troublesome nations on IP.

Biden has always been a believer in enforcing laws and reducing crime, and he has brought that approach repeatedly to the world of copyright. He has promoted that view domestically and internationally and continually reminds us that piracy is in fact a crime that costs our economy nearly $60 billion annually and more than 350,000 jobs.

The Hollywood Reporter ran this great quote of Biden’s:

“When somebody holds you up on the street and takes your wallet, we call it robbery,” Biden said in May 2007. “And when somebody steals your idea and creation, we call it theft, plain and simple.”

As someone who covered Biden as a reporter for ten years, I’d also like to add some personal color. Yes, he’s a talker. Yes, his questions at hearings sometimes are in fact statements that take up all of his time. Biden admits that, and had a great line when he was running for president earlier this year and Brian Williams asked him if he could be concise: Biden responded “Yes.” But Biden, while a straight shooter, is also a facilitator.

I’ll never forget a House-Senate conference I covered about six years ago. We were crammed into a tiny room in the basement of the US Capitol (Heaven forbid a House-Senate conference not be held on neutral ground, even though the Capitol really doesn’t have large rooms) and, like many bills in conference, this one (on child safety and the Internet) had many areas of contention. Often with such legislation, the conflict is across the table, i.e., the House and Senate conference chairmen. But in this case it was two senators sitting next to each other, Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and ranking member Patrick Leahy (D-VT).

Now Hatch and Leahy are like brothers when it comes to promoting intellectual property and are both giants of the Senate, and those of us in the copyright community are most appreciative of their work. But they don’t always see eye to eye, and on this day voices started to be raised. The tension in the room rose rapidly, for the two senators were jammed up right next to each other. It was unclear where this would lead, but it didn’t look good.

That’s when Biden got up out of his chair (he was sitting beside Leahy), walked over and physically inserted himself between Leahy and Hatch. He put one hand on Hatch’s shoulder and the other hand on Leahy’s shoulder, looked back and forth at both of them, and cracked a joke. I wish I could remember what it was, but frankly it didn’t really matter if it was funny or not. It made everyone realize that things were being taken a bit too seriously. Hatch and Leahy both laughed deeply, Biden returned to his seat, and the conference continued as if nothing had happened.

I had long admired Joe Biden for his principled anti-crime and pro-copyright positions, but my admiration grew that day. There will be those in the anti-copyright blogosphere who will criticize his selection; I’m sure he couldn’t care less. But they should know that even if they disagree with his views on IP, he is just as much a conciliator as the candidate many of them admire, Barack Obama.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 2:21 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under capitol hill, international, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.