Reprinted below is an article which appeared in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's newsletter last week. This is important!
~radical sapphoq
* DoJ Reports on Criminal IP Enforcement
This week the Department of Justice issued a 100-page
"progress report" measuring its activities in the
intellectual property arena (copyright, trademark, patents,
trade secrets). This "progress report" is fascinating
reading, describing the DoJ's current enforcement
priorities in the intellectual property realm.
The feds have been staffing up on cybercrime generally,
with more than 230 attorneys working either as CHIP
Coordinators or directly assigned to CHIP Units. The
number of CHIP Units around the country, moreover, has
nearly doubled from 13 to 25 since 2004. (CHIP Units are
specially-trained federal cybercrime prosecutors
concentrated in a particular region.) CCIPS has also
grown, with 35 attorneys, 14 of which are exclusively
devoted to prosecuting IP crimes. (Based in Washington DC,
CCIPS is DoJ's "brain trust" on cybercrime.)
The report mentions several high-profile copyright
enforcement actions, including the colorfully named
Operations Gridlock, Copycat, and Western Pirates. All of
the featured copyright prosecutions involve commercial
piracy or large-scale "release groups." (Notably
overlooked was the federal indictment in Nashville of two
Ryan Adams fans for uploading a few tracks from pre-release
promotional CDs.)
The report details a wide variety of new international
initiatives, including pressuring countries in treaty
negotiations, developing an international "24/7 network" of
law enforcement contacts for computer crime cases, and
adding DoJ "attaches" in Asia and Eastern Europe.
The report endorses the proposed Intellectual Property
Protection Act, which would dramatically expand the scope
of criminal copyright infringement, adding attempt
liability, conspiracy liability, and asset forfeiture. As
we've discussed previously, these proposals are an outrage,
effectively allowing the feds to put people in jail without
having to prove that any actual copyright infringement ever
took place.
All of this suggests that we can expect to see a marked
increase in criminal IP cases being brought by the DoJ.
For the full DoJ "progress report":
<http://www.eff.org/IP/criminal/DoJ-IP-Crime-Report-June2006.pdf>
For more analysis:
<http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004758.php>
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