President Obama signed a law Wednesday intended to protect the trade secrets and intellectual property of U.S. companies and inventors.
The Defend Trade Secrets Act allows aggrieved parties to seek monetary compensation for proprietary information theft in federal court.
“[One] of the biggest advantages that we’ve got in this global economy is that we innovate, we come up with new services, new goods, new products, new technologies,” Obama said as he signed the bill in the Oval Office. “Unfortunately, all too often, some of our competitors, instead of competing with us fairly, are trying to steal these trade secrets from American companies.”
Obama thanked the half-dozen lawmakers in attendance for working together to combat the growing problem of cyberespionage.
“I’m always happy when we pass bills,” Obama said according to reporters on hand. “I want to thank the bipartisan effort that this represents.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who authored the bill, was in attendance, as was Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., and Reps. Doug Collins, R-Ga., Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.
Obama also used the opportunity to push Congress to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“TPP contains additional enforcement tools for us to be able to make sure that any of the countries that are signed up for this have to work with us to prevent this kind of theft of trade secrets,” Obama said about the pending 12-nation treaty.
“And at a time when the Asia Pacific region is growing rapidly and where American businesses are competing, unfortunately one of the problems that we have in that region is the tendency to steal trade secrets, produce knockoffs for those markets, and we end up losing business, and that means we’re losing American jobs,” Obama said.
