Why Is President Obama Setting Up IP Enforcement Committees Rather Than IP Effectiveness Committees?

The White House recently announced that President Obama has signed an executive order creating two new, very high level "intellectual property enforcement committees." The idea is to have high level folks in different federal government agencies coordinating their "enforcement" strategies, when they do things like seizing domains without due process or First Amendment considerations.

Of course, if President Obama were serious about improving American innovation and creative output (and living up to the Constitution), he would have put together intellectual property effectiveness committees, rather than enforcement committees. By this point, you would have to willfully ignore all of the studies highlighting how today's intellectual property laws tend to cause plenty of harm to think that the laws are "effective." That doesn't mean there can't be effective intellectual property laws, just that what we have today clearly does not qualify. Those laws do serve to help some parties, no doubt, but that's not the same thing as benefiting society. The Constitution makes clear that the purpose of patent and copyright laws is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. And yet, at no time has the government ever stopped to look at the question of whether or not these laws actually do promote the progress of science or the useful arts.

It seems, then, that the only reasonable move would not be to ramp up enforcement of the current laws -- which have been shown to be problematic -- but instead to commission a look at what would actually be most effective in promoting the progress. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be in the cards at all. Too bad.

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Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110210/14261513044/why-is-president-obama-setting-up-ip-enforcement-committees-rather-than-ip-effectiveness-committees.shtml

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