Once again President Obama has demonstrated a commitment to copyright owners’ rights, just as more than 11,000 artists and creators asked him to do last fall in a Copyright Alliance letter to him and Vice President Biden. As I have in past posts, here are his own words, in a speech yesterday at the Export-Import Bank in Washington, D.C.:

What’s more, we’re going to aggressively protect our intellectual property. Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people. It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century. But it’s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can’t just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor. There’s nothing wrong with other people using our technologies, we welcome it –- we just want to make sure that it’s licensed, and that American businesses are getting paid appropriately. That’s why USTR is using the full arsenal of tools available to crack down on practices that blatantly harm our businesses, and that includes negotiating proper protections and enforcing our existing agreements, and moving forward on new agreements, including the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

The President listed IP enforcement and protection in a list of activities his Administration is doing to help promote exports of U.S. goods and services, thus preserving and creating U.S. jobs. He has repeatedly, as a U.S. Senator, Presidential candidate and President, demonstrated the connection between respect for the rights of copyright owners and economic growth.

President Obama and his U.S. Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, also understand the importance of improving international coordination and enforcement of existing IP protection treaty obligations, so it was great to see the President specifically promote their work on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. That treaty, as Ambassador Kirk has stated, would not change U.S. law, but instead see that U.S. copyright owners had their rights respected according to both law and international treaty commitments. Unless you don’t like enforcement of IP rights, it’s hard to argue against that.

The Administration’s recently appointed Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (don’t call Victoria Espinel a czar, or czarina, it is a statutory post in the Executive Office of the President) is soliciting feedback on how best to improve U.S. IP policy to ensure more respect for IP rights. Kudos to her and her team.

I’ve written about President Obama, Vice President Biden, and his Cabinet here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for starters.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 1:45 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under Obama, 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.