An Initiative of the Council on Competitiveness

Intellectual Property and Innovation
June 19, 2003
Council on Competitiveness Report on Intellectual Property

Senator Ron Wyden, and Senator John Ensign, in conjunction with the Council on Competitiveness, invite you to join them for a discussion on intellectual property protections and their impact on innovation.
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Featured Speakers:
Bruce Mehlman, serves as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Technology Policy. Nominated by President Bush on April 30, 2001, he was confirmed by the Senate on May 25, 2001. Assistant Secretary Mehlman leads the Office of Technology Policy within the United States Department of Commerce's Technology Administration.
Gigi Sohn, is the President and co-Founder of Public Knowledge. Previously she was a Project Specialist in the Ford Foundation's Media, Arts and Culture unit. Prior to joining the Ford Foundation, she served as Executive Director of the Media Access Project (MAP), a Washington, DC based public interest telecommunications law firm that represents citizens' rights before the Federal Communications Commission and the courts.
James V. DeLong, is a senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation where he directs the Center for the Study of Digital Property. Before joining the Foundation, Jim was senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He has also served as general counsel of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, research director of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and assistant director for special projects in the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC.

In a recent speech, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan posed a series of questions regarding the United States' current approach to protecting intellectual property. He asked, "Are the protections sufficiently broad to encourage innovation but not so broad as to shut down follow-on innovation? Are such protections so vague that they produce uncertainties that raise risk premiums and the cost of capital? How appropriate is our current system - developed for a world in which physical assets predominated - for an economy in which value increasingly is embodied in ideas rather than tangible capital?"

The Forum on June 19th will convene a panel of experts to discuss these questions and others related to how intellectual property is protected via patents, copyrights and trademarks, and whether this protection is encouraging or inhibiting innovation. This broad-based discussion has implications for industries ranging from software to biotechnology to music to telecommunications.

Led by U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and John Ensign, the Forum advocates no particular position or policy prescription. Our sole purpose is to inform. Our briefings are nonpartisan, balanced, and open to the public and the media.