[LINK] US: Intellectual Property and Risks to the Public!

[Marghanita da Cruz]

> Intellectual property are the ideas behind inventions, the artistry that goes into books and music, and the logos of companies whose brands we have come to trust.   My job is to help protect the ideas and creativity of the American public.  One of the reasons that I care about this is because I believe it is enormously important that the United States remain a global leader in these forms of innovation – and part of how we do that is by appropriately protecting our intellectual property.  Our intellectual property represents the hard work, creativity, resourcefulness, investment and ingenuity of the American public.  Infringement of intellectual property can hurt our economy and can undermine U.S. jobs.  Infringement also reduces our markets overseas and hurts our ability to export our products.  Counterfeit products can pose a significant threat to the health and safety of us all.  Imagine learning that the toothpaste you and your family have used for years contains a dang
erous chemical.  U.S. Customs officials have seized several shipments of counterfeit toothpaste containing a dangerous amount of diethylene glycol, a chemical used in brake fluid, and that in sufficient doses is believed to cause kidney failure.  All of these are reasons why your government has renewed its efforts to challenge this illegal activity.
> 
> My job is to help coordinate the work of the federal agencies that are involved with stopping this illegal behavior.  We are going to work together to develop a strategy to reduce those risks to the public, the costs to our economy and to help protect the ingenuity and creativity of Americans.  We want to be able to reduce the number of infringing goods in the United States and abroad.  The examples are almost endless: counterfeit car parts, illegal software, pirated video games, knockoff consumer goods, dangerous counterfeit medicines, and many other types of products – including very sophisticated technology.  Our goal is to better use taxpayer dollars and other government resources to be more effective in reducing any threat to our economy and our safety.  
> To further these goals, we are working to find ways of measuring these threats and their impact on us.  How many jobs depend on the existence of intellectual property?  What are the greatest risks to health and safety?  We need better data on these questions and it is part of my job to figure out what the answers are.  We cannot do that without your help.  So, my office is asking the public to give us information about the costs and the risks – and then give us suggestions for what we could be doing better as a government.   As a first step, we are issuing a notice to the public asking for your input.  Here’s a link to this request (pdf).  You can send your comments to intellectualproperty at omb.eop.gov.  We look forward to hearing from you.
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/02/23/intellectual-property-and-risks-public>
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Marghanita da Cruz
http://ramin.com.au
Tel: 0414-869202