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Software has say Lobbying software execs tout industry's impact By George Leopold, EE, EE Times Washington -- The U.S. software industry executed a full-court press last week. Armed with a new study on its growing impact on the U.S. economy, executives descended on the White House and Capitol Hill to press policy makers on copyright, encryption and securities issues. Led by Microsoft's Bill Gates and Intel's Andrew Grove, software industry leaders trekked here looking for government help in slowing the growing theft of software over the Internet, relief on software encryption exports and uniform securities laws. As part of the pitch orchestrated by the Washington-based Business Software Alliance, nine software executives also released a report boasting that "the growth and development of the software industry are transforming the American economy." he study predicts that by 2005 more than 3 million U.S. workers will be employed in the software industry, up from about 2 million in 1996. Software piracy remains a leading concern for the industry, although industry executives said the problem has shifted from China, where software copying has been widespread, to the Internet. "The software industry continues to get stolen blind," argued Autodesk Chairman Carol Bartz. She said that the group is asking the Clinton administration to help slow the theft of software over the Internet by approving a global intellectual property treaty and extending U.S. copyright laws to the Internet. The White House has generally backed the industry on intellectual property issues, but the two have long been at loggerheads over U.S. encryption policy. The U.S. software industry maintains that strong encryption products up to 128 bits are widely available and that the "cat is already out of the bag" in terms of restricting the technology in the United States. "We want the permission to export the products that are already broadly available," said Jeff Papows, president of Lotus Development Corp. Novell chairman Eric Schmidt agreed. The administration's current key-recovery proposal that gives government agents access to encryption keys "just won't work," he said. The encryption fight has been raging since 1993, and there are few signs that the government is willing to relent on the industry's demands for export liberalization. Software officials conceded as much. "You can't build a technical solution to solve this problem," said Adobe chief John Warnock.
The software executives said their high-profile lobbying effort is consistent
with the industry's growing importance to the U.S. economy. But they remain
frustrated at the slow pace of government reform in areas affecting the
fast-moving high-tech industry.
(c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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