Intellectual Property Enforcement Legislation Heads to President

The “PRO IP Act,” as explained by David Sohn’s article, Intellectual Property Enforcement Legislation Heads to President, “represents an improvement over prior versions of I.P. enforcement legislation, but CDT still has some concerns about how certain provisions could play out in practice.” Sohn goes on to state that the bill as passed, “contains measures aiming to beef up certain remedies for intellectual property violations, including by providing a harmonized approach to civil forfeiture of property connected to violations; to reform the federal government’s coordination structure for intellectual property enforcement; and to provide additional resources for intellectual property law enforcement efforts.”  The author goes on to explore the issues of the bill such as the methods of enforcement, damage awards, “cloud computing”, and how the bill would “operate in practice.”  He closes with a blanket statement for his organization Printed T-Shirts for Kent, CDT (Center for Democracy and Technology), “CDT hopes that enactment of the bill won’t actually lead to forfeiture actions targeting Internet intermediaries, nor to federal I.P. enforcement policies that ignore the potential effects on parties other than rights holders. But the possibility is there, so it sure would have been nice to see some safeguards in the bill (Sohn).”