This Innovation Policy Blog post presents an overview of a study released by Envisional benchmarking the amount of broadband used for online piracy. The findings show that one out of four bits on the Internet is infringing content. How much bigger will piracy need to get before policymakers realize this is a problem?

Some advocates of developing countries contend that too often intellectual property law enforcement keeps developing countries from acquiring drugs or other IP-based technologies critical to overcoming barriers to growth. Some go so far as to say that tough IP laws are nothing more than a sinister way to keep rich countries rich and let poor countries stay poor. China is among the countries that argue that they are poor and that technology transfer (much of it forced or stolen) is an integral part of their development strategy. Yet Chinese firms steal IP not only from rich nations, but also from countries far poorer. In this post, Scott Andes reports from Ghana on how China's IP theft hurts the poor.

ITIF Senior Analyst Daniel Castro will be participating in a COICA panel at the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee's 7th annual State of the Net Conference.  The panel, "Rooting Out Online Copyright Pirates with COICA: Will It Work?," will be a focused discussion on measures specifically dealing with online copyright infringement through legislation, most notably Senator Leahy's “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act.” Included will be an educational background on what law enforcement measures exist and how they are invoked legally and technically. These measures include seizing and removing domain names from the Internet's directories, instructing ISPs to block certain Web addresses from their users, prohibiting advertisers from displaying ads related to these offshore miscreants, and stopping credit card companies from processing their transactions. The discussion will also include the policy implications of such measures and the unintended consequences.

• Daniel Castro, Sr. Analyst, The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
• Dan Kaminsky, Chief Scientist, Doxpara
• Andrew Pincus, Partner, Mayer Brown
• David Sohn, Sr. Policy Counsel, Center for Democracy & Technology

Since last year, the issue of online piracy has not abated and the opposition to Sen. Leahy's proposed legislation--the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA)--remains as heated as ever. Last fall, Daniel Castro wrote an article that summarized criticism of the bill and provided a rebuttal to those arguments. Since COICA draws heavily on ideas proposed by ITIF in the report, Steal These Policies: Strategies for Reducing Digital Piracy, Castro, in a two-part blog series, responds again to some of these concerns. In this post, he dives deeper into the two main objections to COICA: 1) that it will break the underlying technical foundations of the Internet, and 2) that it is a direct threat to and contradiction of the United States' commitment to global Internet freedom.