Tom Sydnor released a short paper this week urging Congress to pass the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act. Tom lays to rest some of the concerns voiced about the bill, including the cost to the federal government:
In the case of ERIPA, the usually sound impulse to avoid further federal spending is misplaced. Dynamic analysis of ERIPA's costs and benefits shows that ERIPA is better than "revenue neutral"--it is "revenue enhancing."
The Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy made this point by commissioning the Tyson Report, a conservative economic analysis of the probable costs and benefits of IPR-enforcement reform.[2] The Tyson Report concluded that because counterfeiting and piracy annually drain about $225 billion from the U.S. economy, IPR-enforcement reforms that only slightly decreased counterfeiting and piracy over three years would increase U.S. output, earnings, and employment enough to increase federal tax revenues by $4.9 to $5.7 per dollar spent on reform, and generate another $1.25 billion in state and local tax revenues. For the American taxpayer, dollars spent on IPR-enforcement reform are investments that offer potential three-year returns of 490% to 570%, even when discounted to present value.
The entire paper can be found
here.