White House Holding Piracy Summit

DesScorp writes in to let us know about a White House piracy summit, which is going on this afternoon. Judging by the press accounts, the sort of intellectual property criminals they are interested in are large-scale DVD bootleggers, not individual downloaders. "Hollywood once again demonstrates its close ties to Washington DC, regardless of who is in power, with a White House summit on piracy to be attended by the top executives in Hollywood, as well as the music industry. Vice President Joe Biden will be leading the summit to discuss organized cooperation between the federal government and the entertainment industry on all matters of piracy. Also at the summit will be the Obama Administration's new Copyright Czar, Victoria Espinal. The summit comes after Congress has earmarked $30 million dollars of taxpayer funds for anti-piracy efforts." According to one attendee's tweet, the press was kicked out of the meeting around 20:45 GMT.

Comments

And I thought...

[rainer_d]

...they were going to discuss about the problem with "real" piracy.
If anything, this should encourage the pirates operating in the Arabian sea near Somalia: unless they start bootlegging songs and movies, they should be relatively save and Uncle Sam will not go after them.
At least not in a big, coordinated way.
In essence, they, the ship-wrecking, people-killing pirates are a mere nuisance, while copyright-violating pirates mean the end of civilization is near.

Or maybe it's just another episode of "Politicians, lobbyist and the low-hanging fruit - how I learned to ignore the big problems while creating and appearing to solve small and irrelevant ones myself".