Senators urge international copyright crackdown

U.S. senators urged the Bush administration on Wednesday to increase pressure on Russia and China to respect copyright law, warning that those nations have become havens for movie and software piracy.

Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who chairs the Senate copyright subcommittee, made one of the most ominous statements to date about what might happen if unfettered piracy continues. "Before Russia enters the (World Trade Organization), many of us will have to be convinced that the Russian government is serious about cracking down on the theft of intellectual property," Hatch said during a hearing.

James Mendenhall, the acting general counsel for the U.S. Trade Representative, said his colleagues are hosting a delegation from China this week to talk in part about copyright law. "We're going to be issuing a request through WTO rules seeking additional information from China on the status of enforcement in China," Mendenhall said. (A WTO spokesman later said the talks were still ongoing.)

The USTR recently highlighted the governments of both Russia and China as top copyright offenders. A report in April placed both on a "priority watch list"--along with Brazil, Israel and Indonesia--and plans to wield the WTO apparatus as a lever to force greater compliance with international norms. Another U.S. tactic is to ink free-trade deals including strict copyright regulations with individual nations.

Piracy in China alone costs U.S. companies between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion a year, the USTR says. Industry estimates place Russia's infringement rates last year at 80 percent for motion pictures, 66 percent for records and music, 87 percent for business software, and 73 percent for entertainment software.

Hatch and Vermont's Patrick Leahy, the panel's top Democrat, said that pirated copies of "Star Wars: Episode III--Revenge of the Sith" already were available on the streets of Beijing and Moscow and expressed frustration about the situation. "What is enough of either a carrot or a stick to make them change, especially when it seems to be governmental policy to allow this?" Leahy asked.

"We've raised the issue at the presidential level, we've put them on the priority watch list," replied Mendenhall. Further progress will take negotiations, WTO pressure and patience, he said.

< Ignore for a minute the fact that what's illegal in this country isn't necessarily illegal in another. Several of the key precepts of this issue strike at the very heart of copyright's purpose in *this* country.

Copyright must strike a balance between providing payment to the creator for his or her work and making that work as widely available as possible. Without offering the work a free sphere of influence, there is no need for copyright, because the creator would be able to control it in other ways, through contract or by showing actual theft. On the other side of the issue is pfoviding feedback, and payment, to the creator. When the creator exceeds his sphere of influence, there is no profit to be made. You can't create an underground comic in Pikipsi and expect to get royalties from Zimbabwe. When you figure the profit potential for these works outside this country, your numbers quickly drop to zero. Even in places where they are Not zero, they are so miserably low that the value of the publicity you may achieve by being there far outweighs the value of capitalist earnings in the same sector. Assuming for a moment that practically no copyrighted works in this country have any valid use outside the country unless they are specifically designed to do so, why is it necessary to even brach the issue? Things which are tailored for release in other areas would, if the creator had a lick of sense, also be tailored for release within the system currently in place in those areas.

Where america goes wrong is in trying to force it's own versions of copyright, which are in no manner superior, rather than allowing other countries to deal with them in their own manner. Sure, applying pressure is fine. Then you have to also realize that the entire issue of copyright springs from popular usage of those materials. When profit wasn't the big catch, copyright was ignored for the most part and everything was fine. In other countries there are other social motives which may make copyright very important or totally useless. This narrow-minded view of what's acceptable is precisely why much of the world dislikes us and knocks over our trade-centers. >