Ah, to get back on topic… The “Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP) Act” was just signed into law by President Bush, after passing the Senate and the House last month. I haven’t looked closely at this bill yet: here are two commentaries from William Patry (before he silenced his public blog) and Cyrus Farivar at Machinist. The main contributions of this bill are two: to massively increase the kind of financial penalties that can be sought in a copyright infringement claim, and to create an “IP czar” position inside the White House.

The first change is curious, but not surprising. The justification for the change is to signal that the US government is serious about piracy. But I think I agree with Patry, that the main thing it does is give the music and movie industries a phenomenally better position from which to pursue their tactic of punishing individual downloaders. In the one case that has been seen through to a monetary award, Capitol v. Thomas, the record labels received $222,000 for 24 songs that Jammie Thomas had made available on a peer-to-peer network. This kind of damages award helps a record label make the case to a downloader that they should “pre-settle” with them before a lawsuit ever occurs, for somewhere between $3000 and $5000. What will that pre-settlement number look like, now that the possible damages have increased 100-fold? What’s curious about this, in my mind, is that many have argued that the existing damages were too high — set to penalize traditional pirates, stamping CDs in a warehouse, they were too large for the case of online file-trading. Part of the question is what the damages represent, and how should they be set: some (i.e. the record labels) argue that the online fil-trader can do more damage, passing their song to millions with one click. The other way to look at it is that the punishment should fit the crime, and putting a few songs in your upload folder is a much smaller violation, in terms of criminal intent or effort, than setting up a street-corner piracy network.

As for an IP czar, I can only imagine. Maybe, in an Obama administration, it could be his friend Lawrence Lessig?