(Washington, DC) — John Scheibel, Vice President and General Counsel of the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) is pleased to announce the association’s support of HR 3048, the Digital Era Copyright Enhancement Act introduced by Reps. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Tom Campbell (R- CA).
“The Boucher-Campbell bill paves the road to the 21st century. In a single piece of legislation, these two distinguished members have managed to facilitate use of the Internet as an educational tool, protect the legitimate intellectual property rights of proprietors, and to promote innovation in advanced technology. The crafting of this bill represents an extraordinary accomplishment,” stated Scheibel.
“The Boucher-Campbell legislation is all about protecting the rights of the average person to participate in the information age and protecting the rights of small and medium-sized high tech companies to compete with the bigger guys in the Internet environment,” Scheibel added.
The bill achieves these objectives in two critical ways:
First, it encourages the use of digital technology in education, research, and library archives, thereby providing wide public access to the information so critical to our daily lives.
Second, it preserves the existing ability of entrepreneurial high tech companies to compete on a level playing field and improve upon existing products. General Motors fully expects Ford and Chrysler to analyze GM cars to determine how they can improve on the GM product. This is an accepted part of competition in a free enterprise society. This bill maintains the ability of computer hardware and software companies to perform the same type of analysis on high tech products currently in the marketplace in order to create better, more innovative solutions to consumer needs.
CCIA looks forward to working with Representatives Boucher and Campbell to pass this bill into law.
CCIA is an association of computer and communications industry firms, as represented by their most senior executives. Small, medium and large in size, these companies represent a broad cross-section of the industry, employing over a half million workers and generating annual revenues beyond 200 billion dollars.