Secretary's Speech

Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez
Remarks at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center
Arlington, Virginia

Thank you and I am very pleased to be here at the opening of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center. I think this is a major step forward. Clearly we’ve recognized from the founding of the nation that intellectual property, innovation will be increasingly important for our economy. I have a quote here, actually quite interesting, by Thomas Jefferson when he, the act went through. It says “the act of Congress authorizing the issue of patents for new discoveries as giving a spring to invention beyond my conception.”

And I think we still feeling very much that way. Every time that we feel like we’ve invented everything, we have another wave of innovation and we are very much in the middle of one today. Intellectual property is about five trillion dollars of our economy so we’re talking about a big part of our economy and will continue to grow and continue to be a bigger portion. As we differentiate our businesses with patents, trademarks, copyrights, things that make our products different from anyone else’s. So the important thing is we cannot allow a world trading environment to develop where intellectual property is not respected. Where intellectual property doesn’t mean anything. We would be at a serious disadvantage because we rely very much on intellectual property.

In 2004 this administration launched what we called STOP!, the Strategy Targeting Organized Piracy. STOP is the most comprehensive effort in our nation’s history to fight intellectual property theft. And bolster cooperation and collaboration across agencies. In my office we have an intellectual property enforcement coordinator, and he has helped facilitate an unprecedented level of interagency coordination and working across agencies understanding that we have to do this together…that not one agency has all of the work, and we will win by coordinating and collaborating with each other.

In the last five years customs seizures and counterfeit and pirated goods have increased by 110 percent. Over the last two years the Justice Department have increase prosecutions by 33 percent, and importantly within that 92 percent increase in defendant sentence over the same period. So, you know there’s actually “teeth” to this and we are punishing people who are infringing on our intellectual property.

The Patent and Trademark Office works closely with its partners in delivering training to foreign government officials to increase enforcement overseas. At the US PTO’s Global and Federal Property Academy we have more than 22 training programs and we have delivered that to more than 700 foreign officials. We’ve worked very hard in ensuring that our trading partners know how to fight intellectual property. More than 1700 have come into the hotline last year and that’s double from the previous year so as time goes on we’re getting more and more people interested in taking ownership for combating intellectual property violations in their own country. On the legislative front I will just say one important activity and that is patent modernization. We want a bill that fairly protects innovators across all business models. We don’t want to see it become easier to infringe on intellectual property. So there’s a bit of a debate going on and we encourage Congress to pass the type of bill that would be balanced across business models.

This new center is, I think, another great example of continuing to make progress in this area. We will have new coordination. We will have the ability to work with each other. It is another great message to the world that we take this extremely seriously. We’ll be able to bring in trading partners and work with them. So, this is a major step forward. Just to give you an idea in terms of not just collaboration inside the U.S. government but also with other governments. We had a joint operation with the European Union focused on enforcing ideas. It’s called Operation Infrastructure, and that resulted in a seizure of more than 360,000 counterfeit integration circuits and networking components and over 40 different trademarks. So we’ve already shown results in collaboration with the European Union.

We also have a joint operation with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police called operation Cisco Raider and that has yielded more than 400 seizures of counterfeited Cisco products with an estimated value of more than 76 million dollars. So there’s a lot of work to do. A lot of people realize this is a high margin and lower risk business than other illicit crime, and what we have to do is ensure that this isn’t a low risk business. Increase the risk, increase the enforcement and this is not just important in the immediate term, but down the road10, 20, 30 years from now. It’s going to continue to be important as we rely more on high technology, on innovation, on patents, on trademarks. This is really the life blood of our economy, so I thank you all for your leadership and for your coming here. Thank you.