It’s a good thing copyright is not a person, because three hundred candles on a cake would likely be a fire hazard. But when you divide three hundred candles across the 11 million Americans working as creators or other contributors in copyright industries, that only leaves 0.0000272 candles per person.

Anyhow, kudos to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) — sponsor in the last Congress of S. 3325, the PRO-IP Act, which is now law and has created a U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator — for honoring the 300th anniversary of the British Parliament’s Statute of Anne, the foundation for copyright law in the American colonies. (That statute also gave a tremendous boost to free speech, as we’ve written.) Please read in full his essay in The Hill.

The Chairman rightly notes how that statute laid the foundation for our Founding Fathers giving authors rights over their own works in the U.S. Constitution. Our society, our culture, our economy, have all benefited during the course of our Republic from this empowerment of artists and creators. The Chairman has always understood this, but he also connects with individual artists and creators, and is in fact an avid photographer.

The PRO-IP Act set in motion a process that will lead to greater coordination of the federal protection and enforcement of copyright owners’ rights. The U.S. IPEC is in fact working on a Joint Strategic Plan to that effect; we submitted comments in a recent U.S. IPEC proceeding noting dozens of studies and analyses of the benefits of copyright and the harms of counterfeiting and piracy. In addition, hundreds of individual artists and creators supporting the Copyright Alliance told their own stories to the U.S. IPEC, Victoria Espinel.

Chairman Leahy in The Hill clearly articulates the need for effective copyright enforcement:

A rampant increase in online piracy threatens the financial viability of those same copyright owners who benefit from our new technology. This risks harming not only those creators, but the hundreds of thousands of jobs that result from their products. It also instills the user with a fundamental mistrust of the technology. Effective intellectual property enforcement is necessary to counter this attack.

On behalf of creators and copyright owners everywhere, a tip of the hat to Chairman Leahy for this timely post, and his decades of service on the critical issue of copyright.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 9:44 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under capitol hill, copyright law, creators, founding fathers, piracy, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.