With Congress in recess for the Holiday, and the “Super Committee” officially resigned to stalemate, it’s unclear how the last month of 2011 will play out in Washington. However, last week saw significant developments for the advancement of cybersecurity legislation. Notably, in a letter to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) indicated that the Senate will consider the issue in early 2012. At about the same time, the Ranking Members of six key senate committees of jurisdiction on Cybersecurity sent a joint letter to the President expressing their desire to move forward on several key cybersecurity issues, and highlighting those that are not quite ready. The one thing that’s for sure is that early 2012 will see a flurry of cyber discussions.
Similarly, indications last week are that privacy issues will also heat up in early 2012. While a firm date has still not been given for the official release of the Commerce Department report on privacy, it’s expected the Report will be released the week of Nov. 28th. Importantly, while the Report will continue to support a legislative Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, officials have expressed the goal to begin moving forward with a multi-stakeholder process to craft privacy codes of conduct as early as January.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Commerce released the results of the 22nd US-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT) meeting between U.S. and Chinese government officials, where a number of commitments were made by Chinese officials during the meeting to address issues between the two countries. Most significantly to SIIA members, the summary indicates that China will take steps to address the use of unauthorized copies of software by government agencies and state-owned enterprises. China pledged to complete this software legalization process by 2012 for Chinese provincial entities and by 2013 for municipal and county-level governments.
And in other IP news, the House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) has announced his plan to mark-up the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261 on Dec. 15th. However, following the lengthy and sometimes contentious hearing that took place last Wednesday, it is quite possible the date will slip while Committee members deliberate several key provisions of the bill.
David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy.