What is this guy smoking :shock: ??
http://www.contentagenda.com/CA6452245.htmlThe Motion Picture Assn. of America is joining forces with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a diverse collection of other industry groups to press Congress and the White House on an ambitious agenda to bolster enforcement of anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting laws.
“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.”
Unlike previous anti-piracy lobbying efforts, the new campaign is aimed less at defining new crimes afflicting particular industries than at elevating enforcement of existing copyright, patent, trademark and trade secret laws to the top of the public policy agenda.
The campaign’s six-point agenda includes:
increasing investigative and enforcement resources at DHS and DOJ, including dedicated, institutionalized IP resources in U.S. attorneys offices;
strengthening enforcement of counterfeiting laws at U.S. borders;
increasing penalties for trafficking in counterfeit and pirated goods;
improving federal coordination of IP enforcement efforts;
reforming civil and judicial processes to combat organized criminal trafficking; and
consumer education.
The group also supports the creation of a new IP enforcement coordinator within the White House.
Property crimes, intellectual or otherwise should never trump crimes against the person (aka acts of violence), anyone stating it should is a lunatic in my book and as for the claimed piracy figures they are just fantasy, even the best study released by the MPAA only shows 6 Bn a year and thats under close debate.
It seems the movie and content control industries are also after getting more public money by asking for a man in the white house at public expense, we must remember organisations like the RIAA pay no taxes already , instead hiding behind a non profit- charity status, something they keep quiet when it comes to them asking for yourselves via congress to foot their expenses for next ludicrous series of laws they want passed.
