I’m sounding like a broken record (kids, ask your parents, an audiophile or a club DJ what a record is), but one can’t ignore the focus President Obama and his Administration is placing on the importance of enforcing intellectual property law, in particular ensuring trading partners adhere to their commitments on IP enforcement in their treaties.

I noted this recently in discussing the great work being done by the U.S. Trade Representative and his team, and the importance of that work for individual artists and creators, small IP-based shops, and those employed with larger copyright-owning industries.

Now let me direct your attention to remarks made recently by President Obama during a town hall meeting in Ohio. An audience member said he was a U.S. patent owner and raised concerns about international infringement of his patent. President Obama took that question and ran with it, but note he chose to speak far more broadly about IP enforcement, specifically citing copyright examples.

I’ll quote the President in totality, to best allow you to draw your own conclusions:

THE PRESIDENT: Well, this is a great question, and this is a huge problem. (Applause.) Look, our competitive advantage in the world is going to be people like this who are using their minds to create new products, new services. But that only helps us and helps you build a multibillion-dollar company if somebody can’t just steal that idea and suddenly start making it in Indonesia or Malaysia or Bangladesh with very cheap workers.

And one of the problems that we have had is insufficient protection for intellectual property rights. That’s true in China; it’s true for everything from bootleg DVDs to very sophisticated software. And
there’s nothing wrong with other people using our technologies. We just want to make sure that it’s licensed and you’re getting paid.

So I’ve given instructions to my trade offices — and we actually highlight this at the highest levels of foreign policy — that these are issues that have to be addressed because that’s part of the reciprocity of making our markets open. And so when I met with President Hu of China, this is a topic that, at dinner, I directly brought up with him. And — but as you point out, it’s got to be sustained, because a lot of times they’ll say, yes, yes, yes, but then there’s no enforcement on their end.

And one of the things that we’re also doing is using our export arm of the U.S. government to help work with medium-sized businesses and small businesses, not just the big multinationals to protect their rights in some of these areas, because we need to boost exports.

Can I just say, we just went through a decade where we were told that it didn’t matter, we’ll just — you just keep on importing, buying stuff from other countries, you just take out a home equity loan and max out your credit card, and everything is going to be okay. And it looked, for a lot of people, like, well, the economy seems to be growing — but it was all built on a house of cards. That’s what we now know. And that’s why if we’re going to have a successful manufacturing sector,
we’ve got to have successful exports.

When I went and took this trip to China, and took this trip to Asia, a lot of people said, “Well, why is he going to Asia? He’s traveling overseas too much. He needs to be coming back home and
talking about jobs.” I’m there because that’s where we’re going to find those jobs, is by increasing our exports to those countries, the same way they’ve been doing in our country. If we increased our exports — our share of exports by just 1 percent, that would mean hundreds of thousands of jobs here in the United States. Five percent — maybe a million jobs, well-paying jobs. So we’re going to have to pry those markets open. Intellectual property is part of that process.

All right, great question.

ADDENDUM: We’ve also noted the bullish approach to copyright enforcement both in the physical and online space by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. In a speech the other day, he spoke extensively about the Obama Administration’s efforts regarding IP and China, including this: “I will continue to push my Chinese counterparts to take more aggressive steps to protect and enforce intellectual property rights.”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 2:43 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under Obama, copyright law, counterfeit, creators, economy, international, licensing, piracy, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.