Obama adopts conservative intellectual property view
U.S. President Barack Obama seems to have moved a bit to the right regarding his views of intellectual property rights, and especially on the subject of the reform of those rights in this new digital age.
Obama gave a speech at the annual gathering of import/export bankers last week in Washingotn, D.C. During which he seems to have become more conservative and less centrist in his views of intellectual property rights. During his speech, Obama said, “We’re going to aggressively protect our intellectual property. Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people…It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century. But it’s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can’t just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor.”
These statements seem to mirror those of the embedded corporate establishment in the United States, and across the world, in industries such as film, music, publishing, manufacturing, video game, and software. In a battle between the old standbys of ownership of intellectual property and a new breed of opinions arising within the generations that have grown up in a digital society, Obama seems to be agreeing with the “suits” and abandoning his campaign rhetoric about bringing all Americans, including American business, into the digital age, according to a CNET story.
Now, it seems, Obama seems to care more about piracy and the monetary supposed losses due to it than anything else in the intellectual property realm. In another part of his speech, Obama said, “There’s nothing wrong with other people using our technologies, we welcome it. We just want to make sure that it’s licensed and that American businesses are getting paid appropriately. That’s why the (U.S. Trade Representative) is using the full arsenal of tools available to crack down on practices that blatantly harm our businesses, and that includes negotiating proper protections and enforcing our existing agreements, and moving forward on new agreements, including the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).”
One wonders if we can look forward to more persecution of college students downloading “free” songs or video on the internet, or to a tightening of electronic publishing controls that will take away the rights we have with paper books, among other concerns, all driven by a President that we thought was forward-looking, not reactionary, during the latest U.S. presidential election. In this area, as in many others, there seems to be a significant difference between the campaign rhetoric and the reality of the current administration.
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March 14th, 2010
He fooled you libs AGAIN! Hahahaha….