ICE
“We’ve started to look at the audience and think, well, that in itself is a opportunity for education: people are seeing seizure notices and learning that these are sites that offer counterfeit goods or pirate material,” he says. As well as these notices, the centre is educating the public about IP crimes. Te announcements, which can reach hundreds of thousands of people each time, detail the number of jobs lost to counterfeit sales. Barnett is realistic, though: “We’re not suggesting that a seizure notice or a public service announcement is, in itself, going to stop the purchase of counterfeit goods.”
But in the case of file-sharing website Megaupload, shut down by the FBI on copyright infringement grounds, the IPR Center’s badge, placed on the disabled site, has been viewed more than two billion times. Barnett points out that if only 1 percent of these viewers stopped purchasing counterfeit goods, that’s 20 million people. Similarly, if a tenth of the 90 million viewers of the ICE-seized domains stopped downloading or buying illegally, it would equal 900,000 people. Assertions such as these are only guesses of what might happen but they point
to an interesting argument: the authorities can use an inexpensive tactic to warn large numbers of people about infringing IP.
“IN THE CASE OF FILE-SHARING WEBSITE MEGAUPLOAD, SHUT DOWN BY THE FBI ON COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT GROUNDS, THE IPR CENTER’S BADGE, PLACED ON THE DISABLED SITE, HAS BEEN VIEWED MORE THAN TWO BILLION TIMES”
Barnett says there is a great deal of work ahead and admits that law enforcement is not the complete answer to this problem. “It is going to take far more than that,” he notes. “We don’t have enough agents to stop counterfeit products entering the US, or to stop the consumption of pirated material on the Internet.” So while website seizure may not be the whole answer, it is certainly a tool that can supplement the IPR Center’s much wider and more complex approach to combating IP infringement.
As long as these efforts intensify, and as long as non-US citizens are arrested, controversy and opposition will exist. But Barnett is clear that US officials do have the mandate to tackle IP ‘theſt’, that they adhere to strict legal requirements and they will adapt to the criminals’ increasingly sophisticated tactics. It doesn’t matter where the alleged crimes have occurred, or in which country their perpetrators reside, US law enforcement will not hold back. n
www.worldipreview.com
World Intellectual Property Review May/June 2012
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