NBC Universal's CEO Jeff Zucker isn't a sucker: the CEO of one of the world's largest broadcasting giants says he knows that the war on piracy is failing. Rather than look for new business solutions to this aging issue, however, Zucker wants to see the US government step in and create what can only be called a new intellectual property regime to stop piracy. For Zucker, the war on piracy is a resource game, and all that's needed are more resources.

Zucker appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box program (webcast) yesterday to discuss his views on piracy in the wake of a report that claims that more than $58 billion is lost to piracy right now (we are attempting to obtain the actual study, but the Institute for Policy Innovation has yet to release it). Zucker introduced the study at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce conference.

On CNBC, Zucker said that the problem of piracy is "actually growing," and "we've done nothing to combat it in a way that's stemming any of those [piracy] numbers." "This is the new face of economic crime in this country," he said.

Piracy, Zucker argued, goes far beyond the entertainment world, as it affects health care with counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and "counterfeit airplane parts," he said. "Law enforcement needs greater resources, greater penalties that will get in the way of those pirates."

Perhaps Zucker will be pleased by today's RIAA verdict, which granted the RIAA a precedent-setting victory and $220,000 in damages. The RIAA plans to use the case to promote what happens when you engage in file sharing and don't settle. Fear, the RIAA hopes, will scare people straight.

At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce conference, Zucker was also rallying the troops around the notion that more enforcement will fix the problem. As Anne Broache at News.com reports, Zucker said that intellectual property theft should be the center of attention at all levels of government, all the way up to the White House. The government should create a central intellectual property task force to coordinate enforcement, and also manage a grant and subsidy program aimed at getting state and local governments involved in the effort.

Zucker also trotted out the view that all internet service providers should help stop piracy by installing filtering software. This is a reiteration of the position Rick Cotton, NBCU's general counsel, submitted to the FCC earlier this year, which we reported on extensively here. It boils down to this: content producers like NBCU seem to resent ISPs, because they know that ISPs have the ability to generally shape traffic. They mistake this for an ability to filter content for copyrighted works and thus argue that ISPs are "hiding" behind the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA. In this way, what Zucker, et al. imagine is really a major overhaul to the country's intellectual property laws, and one which would tip the balance even further away from consumers, towards Big Content.