Piracy Campaign Should Emulate Net Governance Win, Ex-NTIA Chief Says
As copyright-dependent industries struggle to capture the attention of the White House and Congress concerning intellectual property (IP) theft, they were advised to look back to one of the rare united U.S. responses to an international tech matter. Industry panic over an international bureaucratic takeover of Internet governance sparked an amazing response at the World Summit for the Information Society a few years ago, former NTIA administrator Mike Gallagher told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Anti-Counterfeiting and Piracy Summit Wednesday.
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Such a tactic should guide IP industries now, said Gallagher, who recently took over the Entertainment Software Association. The private sector was energized and “interfaced very effectively” with the Bush Administration and Capitol Hill, and “Congress responded in a unified way,” he said. The transparency of the U.S. policy process shows other governments exactly how much support -- or division -- there is around any particular policy, he said. House and Senate resolutions backed the continued U.S. authority over the Internet, “and the rest of the world backed down.” The world is watching now again on U.S. IP policy. “If we flag just one bit… why would they impose those laws on themselves?” Gallagher said.
“We're barely holding our own” in the film industry against piracy, and the TV networks are falling behind, said MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman. Studios are “trying to rapidly upgrade” relationships with universities to stanch the piracy on campuses, which accounts for nearly half of piracy losses, he said. Glickman and David Hirschmann, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber, said students may be mobilized against piracy like they have become activists against sweatshops -- some of which churn out counterfeit goods -- and for fair-trade coffee. There’s an “erosion of support” for IP within the U.S. government, because “IP is on fire but it’s not quite burning the house down,” Hirschmann said.
The videogame industry is expected to hit $50 billion in revenue worldwide by 2011, Gallagher said, and pays average salaries of $90,000. Online gaming is the growth engine in the industry, which ESA projects will triple in revenue over the next few years, but massively multiplayer online games are heavily pirated. Halo 3 brought in $170 million its first day but it cost $20 million to make, he said.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prevents device tampering to play pirated games, protecting game makers, said Gallagher. But in Europe he sees “trend lines that are disturbing” in the form of antitrust actions against Microsoft, Qualcomm and Intel “because of their genius and knowhow… We cannot afford to have that beacon dimmed one bit.” The danger is acute, especially in the last year of a two-term presidential administration, in which other countries know that the next president will take a year to get up to speed on IP, he said. “We're the country of the First Amendment. We're the country behind ideas.” Companies should be “encouraging and providing the tools to our government to make that case for us so we have a firm foundation around the world,” Gallagher said.
“The big issue is intensity,” Glickman said. IP industries must make politicians feel “vulnerable” if they keep silent on IP protection and get unions involved, he said. Later he clarified the Hill’s role. The industries aren’t getting “stonewalled” by lawmakers. “We need to get recharged with this issue,” and raise IP protection as the highest national economic security issue on the country’s agenda, Glickman said.
The friendly panel of ex-lawmakers and bureaucrats, which included PHRMA President Billy Tauzin, former chairman of the House Commerce Committee, riffed on Tauzin’s claim that the drug industry is the “canary in the cage” for piracy. Glickman called himself the “singing parrot,” and Gallagher, referring to the popular videogame character, said he’s the “Master Chief of the Mario coal mine.”