Archive for month: March, 2010

by Greg Sandoval

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama was young, a technology fan, and appeared to be an establishment outsider. For those reasons some techies hoped he might be sympathetic to copyright reform.

Those hopes are fading fast as President Obama appears to have lined up on the side of copyright owners. In a speech at the Export-Import Bank’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., President Obama told attendees Thursday that his administration is firmly behind producers of creative works.

“We’re going to aggressively protect our intellectual property,” Obama said. “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.”

The president’s comments come as his administration continues to revitalize an improving but still ailing U.S. economy. They echo statements made often by leaders in the U.S. film, music, video game, and software industries. For a while these sectors have claimed piracy and Internet file sharing mean the loss of U.S. jobs and poison the economy. Critics say that the job losses are more due to poor business decisions made by the studios and music labels. Read more