Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, designs, info-tech and confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. Read, post comments and participate!

The team is Eleonora Rosati, Annsley Merelle Ward and Merpel. E-mail the Kats here!

The team is joined by GuestKats Kevin Bercimuelle-Chamot, Jocelyn Bosse, Alessandro Cerri, Anastasiia Kyrylenko, Marcel Pemsel and Anna Maria Stein.

SpecialKats: Verónica Rodríguez Arguijo (TechieKat), Antonios Baris (Book Review Editor), Rose Hughes (PatKat) and Chijioke Okorie (Africa Correspondent).

InternKats: Asude Sena Moya and Söğüt Atilla.
Home / /
FBI AGENTS - COMING TO AN IP OFFICE NEAR YOU


The US Department of Justice (DoJ) wants tough new antipiracy powers according to ZDNet. On Tuesday the DoJ issued a report calling for the power to conduct wiretaps when investigating serious intellectual property offences and the creation of a new offence of importation of pirated material. Most dramatically, the DoJ is also calling for FBI agents to be stationed in Budapest and Hong Kong to help local officers and to provide training on enforcement.

"The department is prepared to build the strongest, most aggressive legal assault against intellectual-property crime in our nation's history," said Attorney General John Ashcroft. Readers will note that he hasn't limited his comments to copyright, and indeed, there are recommendations concerning trademark infringements, trade secret violations and fake pharmaceuticals.

The IPKat is amazed by the lengths to which the DoJ is going to make IP infringement a criminal rather than civil matter but he's even more stunned at the thought of US officials being stationed abroad for the cause of IP. He wonders what the countries that are thought to need such "assistance" will make of the plans.

More American invasions here, here and here.
Reviewed by Anonymous on Friday, October 15, 2004 Rating: 5

2 comments:

  1. AnonymousMonday, 18 October 2004 at 13:20:00 GMT+1

    I have heard that the US Embassy in Beijing already has a Mandarin-speaking IP attorney in residence. Perhaps it is only a small step to posting agents. The FBI itself has made 'IP crime' a priority enforcement target since about 1999.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMonday, 18 October 2004 at 13:35:00 GMT+1

    There is a need to balance between the need to protect enterprises from losing large amounts of money as a result of such IP violations and the need to restrain from overly infringing on individual rights and more importantly state soveringty. It seems to me that the suggested antipracy powers would overstep the boundaries between regulation and infringement,greatly tipping towards the latter. Hence I do not think this is the best way to go about protecting against violations.

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Subscribe to: Post Comments ( Atom )
Powered by Blogger.