Bush enacts PRO-IP anti-piracy law

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By Jon Gillespie-Brown | October 14, 2008

U.S. President George W. Bush Monday signed into law a bill designed to increase protection of intellectual property (IP) such as software, films and music by raising penalties for infringement and creating a national "IP czar."

So reports the NY Times and about time if you ask me, we need greater protections and clearer messages to people that piracy is a crime and we shouldn’t do it…

There will be no convincing some people but the average "Joe" should be clear it’s not OK, especially with a recession coming we need all the value from our IP we can get.

The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2007, or PRO-IP Act, creates a high-ranking IP protection overseer, appointed by the Senate and reporting directly to the president. The position’s first appointee will likely come from the next U.S. administration. The U.S. Department of Justice will also form a new division dedicated to enforcing intellectual property protection.

Now don’t get me wrong, I also agree with the new business models coming out that let you have less restrictive DRM on video and music but that’s more of a practical user friendly matter than the belief I should not pay. I admin when I was kid i copied my favorite songs onto compilation tapes but hey I did actually buy the original music to do that…to me this is fair and reasonable.

I don’t want this act to encourage the bad side of DRM and silly court dramas over single users and their iPods but I do think that people should be given a strong message particularly in critical areas for the economy and jobs like software protection.

Nowadays there are plenty of models where you can get software and services for free and that’s really great but where businesses need to or choose to charge for their efforts this needs to be protected in my view.

I also think that this act should be used against the big web sites and auctions that proliferate counterfeit software and get away with it for a start along with many of the other key distribution points that are obvious for anyone to find.

Clearly piracy is going to tough to beat in any meaningful way but small businesses and consumers should be made aware that their actions do affect their Country and the software business as a whole when they are tempted to cut corners and copy software.

Also, the onus should be on the software publisher to take action too and provide user friendly copy protection models and ways to buy their products.