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Posts Tagged ‘South Africa’
March 23rd, 2020 at 10:22 am
Trump Administration Stands Up for U.S. Copyright Protections Under Potential South African Threat
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At CFIF, we’ve unceasingly highlighted the foundational role of intellectual property (IP) rights – patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets – in what we know as “American Exceptionalism.”

No nation matches our legacy of IP protection throughout the decades and centuries.  Our Founding Fathers specifically inserted IP protections in Article I of the Constitution, even before the First Amendment or other Bill of Rights protections.

As a direct result no nation in human history remotely matches our legacy of scientific inventiveness, artistic innovation, global influence, power and prosperity.

And today, IP-centric industries account for about 40% of the total U.S. economy, and 45 million jobs – nearly 30% of the U.S. labor force.  For perspective, that U.S. IP economic sector outsizes the entire economies of every other economy on Earth with the sole exception of China.

Recently, we’ve particularly highlighted the role that patent rights play in medical innovation, which has obviously taken on increased importance amid the coronavirus pandemic.  Believe it or not, America accounts for an astounding two-thirds of all worldwide pharmaceutical innovation, due in large part to the IP incentives that allow innovators to receive the fruits of their difficult and costly labor.  That continues today, more than ever.

But in the IP realm, copyright plays just as vital a role in America’s legacy of innovation, influence and prosperity.  After all, just ask yourself what nation today or throughout history even approaches our artistic influence from music to cinema to television to any other form of artistic creation.  That’s the direct result of strong copyright protections for innovators in the U.S.

Unfortunately, other nations not only don’t respect copyright and other IP rights to the degree that we do, they actively seek to undermine U.S. protections.  As the latest example, the nation of South Africa, which hasn’t adequately or effectively protected U.S. copyrights.  And making matters worse, the South African legislature recently passed two proposed laws that further weaken copyright protections and sent them to the South African president for signature.

Fortunately, the Trump Administration is standing up for U.S. copyright and must remain so.

By way of quick background, the U.S. government practices what is known as the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program, which allows for duty-free importation of various goods from developing nations that we designate as beneficiaries of the program.  In April of last year, as part of our annual review of GSP beneficiary nations, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) formally requested that the U.S. government specifically analyze South Africa’s status under GSP eligibility criteria because of South Africa’s longstanding inadequacy in terms of copyright protection for American copyrighted works.  In October, the administration accepted that petition and commenced a review, including a public hearing that occurred on January 30 of this year.  As the U.S. government rightly reconsiders South Africa’s GSP eligibility, petitioners ask that its legislature reconsider the two proposed bills and remove the defective anti-copyright provisions.

If that corrective action by South Africa’s government does not occur, the U.S. should in fairness withdraw South Africa’s continuing enjoyment of the GSP program’s benefits.

Unfortunately, some groups here in the U.S. seek to undermine American copyright laws, and are acting to pressure the Trump Administration and government officials to give South Africa a free pass.

That mustn’t be allowed.  Our protection of copyright and other IP rights is a primary – if not the primary – reason for America’s unrivaled legacy of innovation and prosperity.

The Trump Administration has strengthened America’s IP legacy after eight years of decay under Barack Obama.  For example, the administration strengthened IP protections during renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).  That included stronger patent protections for pharmaceuticals, as well as higher enforcement against counterfeit copyrighted and other goods.  It is doing the right thing with regard to South Africa as well, and it mustn’t allow domestic or overseas interest groups to pressure it into doing otherwise.

Particularly at a time like this, we cannot allow other countries to undermine our legal rights globally, whether South Africa or others.

 

December 6th, 2013 at 4:26 pm
A Classless Act from President Obama
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The White House announced today that President Obama and the First Lady will be traveling to South Africa next week to pay their respects to the memory of Nelson Mandela. That’s as it should be. While the media’s rush to canonize Mandela is a bit overwrought (his ultimate legacy was unquestionably positive, but that shouldn’t be allowed to obscure his many faults, which are presented in an admirably balanced fashion in National Review’s editorial on his life), his was still a deeply significant life, worthy of presidential recognition.

Given that sentiment, you may be wondering what the “classless act” I’m referring to in the title is. It’s not paying homage to Mandela; it’s the contrast with the events of eight months ago, when this happened:

Friends and allies of Baroness Thatcher expressed ‘surprise and disappointment’ last night as it emerged President Obama is not planning to send any serving member of his administration to her funeral.

… a US embassy spokesman confirmed that no serving member of his administration would be present to pay their last respects, citing a busy week in US domestic politics.

Obviously, the President — with his signature policy initiative currently on life support — is no less pressed for time now than he was upon Lady Thatcher’s death. It doesn’t take too deep a dive into his intellectual biography to find the root cause of this double standard: Obama has been open about his identification with Mandela; Thatcher was clearly a figure he regarded as alien at best, an attitude he seems to apply to the British with some regularity.

Obama is perfectly within his rights as an individual to hold some world figures in higher esteem than others. As President, however, he ought to feel obligated to remember the importance of his ceremonial role — one in which he is a totem of the United States, even if it occasionally puts him in positions that make him squeamish. Nelson Mandela deserves his recognition; Margaret Thatcher did too. It’s a shame that he couldn’t rise above his own university campus provincialism to pay her that respect.

August 30th, 2013 at 6:00 pm
The Hollywood Slander of Ronald Reagan
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Ronald Reagan may have been the only American president to emerge from Tinseltown (excepting the fact that Barack Obama is clearly a character created by Aaron Sorkin), but that hasn’t inspired any loyalty. The new movie, The Butler, is rife with mischaracterizations of racial progress in America (as ably pointed out by Richard Epstein for the Hoover Institution) — and it’s especially unkind to the Gipper. As Steve Hayward, Paul Kengor, Craig Shirley, and Kiron Skinner — Reagan biographers all — note in today’s Washington Post, Reagan demonstrated a lifetime’s worth of tolerance and enlightenment on racial issues.

One of the film’s larger errors is an implicit assertion that Reagan opposed economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa out of simple indifference to black suffering. But as his chroniclers note, the reality is much more complicated:

The unfairness of this scene can be demonstrated by any number of historical facts. In June 1981, still recovering from an assassination attempt, Reagan sent his closest foreign policy aide, William Clark, on his first official trip; it was to South Africa to express America’s disapproval. An unsmiling Clark told Prime Minister Pieter W. Botha to his face that the new president and administration “abhorred apartheid.” Clark walked out on Botha.

While accurate in depicting Reagan’s opposition to sanctions against South Africa, “The Butler” does not explain why he opposed them. Reagan saw sanctions as harmful to the poorest South Africans: millions of blacks living in dire poverty. He also feared that the apartheid regime could be replaced by a Marxist/totalitarian one allied with the Soviet Union and Cuba and that communism would spread throughout the continent. South Africa’s blacks were denied rights under apartheid, but communism would mean no freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, conscience, emigration, travel or even property for anyone. Moreover, in communist nations such as Cambodia and Ethi­o­pia, people had been slaughtered and starved on mass scales. Nearly a dozen nations had become part of the Soviet orbit in the immediate years before Reagan became president. He didn’t want South Africa to undergo the same catastrophe.

Reagan adopted a policy of “constructive engagement,” seeking to keep South Africa in the anti-Soviet faction while encouraging the country toward black-majority rule — no easy feat. In one of his finest speeches, he told the United Nations on Sept. 24, 1984, that it was “a moral imperative that South Africa’s racial policies evolve peacefully but decisively toward . . . justice, liberty and human dignity.” Among his administration’s successes was the Angola-Namibia agreement, which led to the withdrawal of the white South African regime from Namibia and paved the way for that nation’s independence.

Moral preening is always easiest when one bears no responsibility for the consequences. Statesmen weigh trade-offs. Ronald Reagan knew that. Thanks to the current situation in Syria, Barack Obama is about to get a master’s class on the topic.