In it, he makes a rather remarkable claim:
Q: You've said that the theft of intellectual property is a national security problem. Why?A: First of all, we talk about it being an issue of economic national security. Our economy is so based on intellectual property ideas that, unless we can protect them, we're really looking at a situation where it's going to hurt our ability to survive as a country.
Secondly, so much of what we do now involves computers, whether it be with software or other types of communication lines. Often, intellectual property is a key component to the things we do to protect ourselves as a country.
Lets have a look at these two claims.
First, there is the question of economic losses from piracy. The entire US movie industry's revenue stream is somewhere like $40B. The US recording industry's revenue is something like $15B. (These numbers might be off a bit but they're the right ballpark, which is enough for this calculation.) That's $55B total. The U.S. economy as a whole is somewhere in the vicinity of $12,000B. That means if the entire music and movie industries vanished without a trace, the economy would (worst case) shrink by something like 0.4%. Note that this does not take in to account new economic activity that might be engendered by piracy, which might be substantial.
Even assuming that we had much more than 0.4% drop in economic activity with the demise of the movie and record industries — which I seriously doubt — it would still hardly count as something that could, and I quote David Israelite, "hurt our ability to survive as a country". I suspect that, given the figures from recent recessions, we could manage far worse without our "survival" being at stake.
Second, Mr. Israelite notes that people use computers and communications lines, and then somehow implies that computers or communications systems would be threatened were intellectual property threatened. I will note that I am writing this blog on a computer using no proprietary software whatsoever, and my server has no proprietary software on it either. Obviously our use of computers and the internet could continue unabated were proprietary software to vanish. If Mr. Israelite has a specific point on this, he has made it rather poorly.
Overall, I judge the claims he makes to be poorly founded. However, the promulgation of such claims is rather predictable in the light of Public Choice theory.