joegratz.net

Via 27B/6 comes news that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has published a report on the dangers of P2P filesharing. Here’s the press release, and here’s the report.

I, too, am very concerned about the dangers P2P filesharing poses to patent and trademark holders. Why, who knows what patents might be infringed by the BitTorrent or FastTrack protocols? The P2P software distributors might be marking their goods with the name of an unrelated firm, in an attempt to pass off their goods as manufactured by another! This menace to inventors and marketers has been brought into your child’s bedroom!

Oh, wait. The report is about copyright infringement, not patent or trademark infringement. And that’s what makes this whole affair rather curious. The USPTO doesn’t administer copyright law; the Copyright Office does. This matters, in part, because the Copyright Office is part of the Library of Congress, which is part of the Legislative branch, whereas the PTO is part of the Department of Commerce, which is part of the Executive branch.

The PTO has attempted from time to time — particularly under Bruce Lehman — to take over the administration of copyright law, but these attempts have been rebuffed. This report was nominally issued by the PTO’s Office of International Relations (the only part of the PTO which has any copyright-related duties, in that it advises foreign governments on all IP issues and deals with all IP treaties), but the report’s connection to any international matter is unclear. One wonders whether this is the start of yet another attempt by the PTO to gain authority over copyright law.