Congressman: Copyright not made to “pad wallets” of creators

Rep. Howard "Hollywood" Berman (D-CA) isn't happy with Marshall, Texas, seat of the federal Eastern District of Texas. The town now boasts a luxury hotel and several nice restaurants, owing in part to the huge influx of patent lawyers. The federal court in Marshall has become one of the hottest jurisdictions in the country for patent cases because it's deemed to be plaintiff-friendly and relatively quick to act. That has led to a serious case of "venue shopping," and Berman wants to fix it with the patent reform bill currently trudging though Congress. But he knows it's an uphill fight, and with his own chairmanship of the House subcommittee that deals with intellectual property coming to an end, he's turning his hope this year another IP bill instead: the PRO-IP Act.

At a talk given at Tech Policy Summit in California last night, Berman showed himself a thoughtful legislator when it comes to IP issues like patents and copyright. For instance, he noted that he and Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) spend plenty of time worrying about the danger of "squeezing fair use" too much with new copyright legislation, and he also noted his belief that copyright doesn't exist to "pad the wallets" of content creators; it's to create public good.

But Berman also showed his long-standing sympathies to content creators, strongly backing the PRO-IP Act and saying that "stealing intellectual property is like stealing property."

With the passing of Rep. Tom Lantos a few weeks back, Berman has since moved to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Due to a quirk of Democratic party rules, though, he will actually chair both of his committees through the end of this year ("I ain't doing this next year!" he said of running two committees), and he's determined to push through the PRO-IP Act before he steps off the IP subcommittee.

"I think this is going to pass" this year, he said, noting that the PRO-IP Act hasn't generated the intense industry fights that patent reform has. (The most controversial proposal was pulled from the bill by Berman's subcommittee.)

But what happens next year with a new Congress? Speculation has run rampant about who might succeed Berman, with Boucher's name figuring prominently in those speculations. Berman's acknowledges that he has "heard things" and that he "has thoughts" about the succession, but he then grinned and added, "I'm not sure why I'd want to share them."

No matter what happens, though, Berman isn't getting out of the IP business. Foreign Affairs does still touch on IP issues like piracy, which is "sucking huge economic value out of our economy," and Berman will continue to press for US copyright interests abroad.

And with that, it was off to a Lakers game with his grandson.