The House Judiciary IP Subcommittee hearing on copyright...

general-criminal division; Matt Schruers, Computer & Communications Industry Association vice president-law and policy; CEO Steven Tepp of Sentinel Worldwide, an intellectual property consulting firm; Sherwin Siy, Public Knowledge vice president-legal affairs; and Nancy Wolff, Cowan DeBaets partner, according to a committee document. “The first duty of a remedies system must surely be to end infringements, or ideally to prevent them from occurring,” said Tepp in prepared testimony he provided us. Tepp was formerly chief IP counsel at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center. “Equitable, injunctive relief is available for precisely these purposes,” he said. “Consistent with the goal of preventing infringement, section 503 of the Copyright Act grants courts the authority to order the impounding of infringing copies, the means by which those copies are reproduced, and records documenting the manufacture and sale related to the infringement,” Tepp said. “It can scarcely be argued that allowing infringing copies or the implements with which they are produced to remain in the hands of infringers is good policy,” he said. “In some cases the existing remedies are punitive, which discourages innovation,” said Schruers, in prepared testimony he sent to us. “The existing statutory damages framework has created incentives for so-called copyright trolling, or predatory enforcement,” he said. Secondary liability infringement claims can inflict “potential exposure to large damages, often for the acts of customers,” Schruers said. Section 504(c)(2) of the Copyright Act “could limit statutory damages only to cases of direct infringement,” he said. “Alternatively, Congress could forbid aggregation in secondary liability cases,” he said.