WASHINGTON – April 29, 2020 – BSA | The Software Alliance welcomes today’s release of the 2020 Special 301 report by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), as well as USTR’s attention to the worldwide challenge presented by the use of unlicensed software, which has a market value of nearly $50 billion.

The Special 301 statute requires USTR to identify countries that deny adequate and effective intellectual property (IP) protection as well as countries that deny fair and equitable market access to US persons who rely on IP protection. BSA urges USTR, in the Special 301 process, to address these market access barriers, which represent an increasingly urgent threat to the US software industry and its ability to continue leading global advances in innovative technology.

As detailed in BSA’s 2020 Special 301 submission, US trading partners deny US IP holders fair and equitable market access through a wide array of innovation-related trade barriers that should be addressed in the annual Special 301 process. This includes unnecessarily restrictive measures to prevent US IP holders from transferring data across borders — whether through data localization measures or by imposing unreasonable conditions in order to send it abroad. There is an urgent need for increased attention to these innovation-related cross-border data restrictions, which disproportionately impact US IP-intensive industries, including the US software industry.