U.S. Seeks Public Feedback on Copyright Enforcement

Victoria Espinel, the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, sometimes referred to as the “Copyright Czar”, has announced a round of public comment on copyright and copyright-enforcement related issues.

Specifically, Office of Management and Budget (and the Executive Office of the President) are seeking feedback on the following topics:

• “Identifying the costs to the U.S. economy resulting from infringement of intellectual property rights, both direct and indirect, including any impact on the creation or maintenance of jobs.” As well as health and safety issues created by the infringement of copyright, both in the U.S. and abroad.
• “Recommendations for accomplishing one or more of the objectives of the Joint Strategic Plan.” Those objectives include, among others, reducing the supply of infringing goods, reducing the number of countries that fail to enforce intellectual property, disrupting infringement networks and increasing the efficiency of U.S. enforcement.

The requests also lists some 20 supplemental topics for comment, including many that deal with ways to improve IP enforcement coordination between various government agencies and information about new technologies that may help the government enforce intellectual property better.

The deadline for comments is March 24, 2010 at 5 PM. Submissions should be sent via email to intellectualproperty at omb.eop.gov. Please note that all submissions will be published online so do not provide any confidential information in any submissions you file.

You can view the full call for submissions here (PDF) and for further information you can call Thomas L. Stoll, Office of the
Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. His contact information is in the full PDF.

Personally, I am debating whether I should submit a comment or not. Though much of the information requested lies outside of my particular area of work, there are some questions, including many of the supplementary questions, that I have thoughts on that might be of use. If I do file such a submission, I will post it here as well.

In the meantime, I highly encourage anyone who has something to say on these topics and can provide the required information to consider writing in. This is a very rare moment for U.S. Copyright Law where public opinion is being so openly sought and I encourage those interested in these topics to take advantage of the opportunity.