SIIA Says Obama Administration’s IP Enforcement Strategy Will Advance Efforts on Software Compliance, Domain Name Expansion and Other Key Issues

SIIA today commented on the IP Enforcement Strategy announced by Victoria Espinel, the Administration’s Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. The new Administration plan addresses a wide range of IP enforcement issues, offering numerous specific actions by federal agencies aimed at helping to protect and advance creativity and innovation. We look forward to seeing the Administration move quickly on the actions they have proposed.

We are particularly focused on the plan’s continued call for software compliance throughout the federal government. While we commend the plan’s continued emphasis on software compliance, we are disappointed that it does not likewise address content compliance. We have pushed the Administration to act on both software and content compliance, and will continue to seek Executive action that includes content.

We welcome greater involvement by the Administration in the expansion of domain names by ICANN, which will have far reaching implications for businesses, brands and consumers. In monitoring the expansion and seeking public input along the way, the federal government will be in much better position to advocate on behalf of U.S. interests.


Keith Kupferschmid is General Counsel and SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA.

Digital Policy Roundup: Week of Jan. 10

As Congress began to settle in last week, and policymakers gathered in Las Vegas for CES, the White House generated two VERY big — albeit VERY lightly reported — victories for the digital policy world.

First, the President signed into law the America COMPETES Act of 2010, following congressional passage of this legislation as one of the last acts of the highly-productive Lame Duck session in December. The legislation authorizes significant investment in R&D and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. America COMPETES has been a virtually unanimous high priority for the entire U.S. IT sector, and it’s now officially law.

Second, the White House did a loud shout-out to IT interoperability in a memo issued on Friday by three top officials calling on Agencies to seek “technology neutrality” in their efforts to IT products and services. The memo, from Fed. CIO Vivek Kundra, Procurement Administrator Daniel Gordon and IP Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, calls on agencies to select “suitable IT on a case-by-case basis” to consider “factors such as performance, cost, security, interoperability, ability to share or re-use, and availability of quality support.”

For more information about policy issues SIIA monitors, subscribe to the weekly policy email update, Digital Policy Roundup.