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Counterfeiting and Piracy
Counterfeiting and piracy cost the U.S. economy between $200-$250 billion per year, a total of 750,000 American jobs, and pose a real threat to consumer health and safety. Individual companies and industries have unsuccessfully tried to fight this problem on their own. While some efforts have produced positive results, business was losing the war.
Since there is no single solution to this problem, it was clear that the business community must work together to attack this growing threat on multiple fronts. As a result, in 2004 the U.S. Chamber launched a multi-million dollar global initiative to thwart the growing threat of counterfeiting and piracy, protect public health and safety, defend the rights of business, and establish fair competition throughout the international marketplace. We are operating globally with specific programs in China, India, Brazil, Russia, and Korea.
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Our mission is simple: to make the world a miserable place for modern day counterfeiters and pirates. We have implemented a two part strategy of education and increased detection and enforcement efforts. Our primary objectives are:
- Measure and ultimately reduce the global economic impact of counterfeiting and piracy.
- Reframe the debate about counterfeiting and piracy by educating businesses, lawmakers, law enforcement officials, and consumers here and abroad on the growing economic impact and public health, safety and national security threats.
- Build coalitions to unite industry to collectively work towards global solutions.
- Set the global standard in the U.S. for intellectual property protection by toughening existing laws at the federal and state level, disrupting the flow of illegal goods into the legitimate supply chain with sophisticated detection efforts and law enforcement efforts and aggressively prosecuting intellectual property theft.
- Train government officials, law enforcement, judges, and prosecutors in our targeted countries to give them the tools necessary to arrest and prosecute counterfeiters and pirates.
Since the start of the initiative, the Chamber has made real progress. The efforts of our coalition, the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy (CACP) prompted the first comprehensive government-wide Strategy targeting organized piracy. Additionally, the Chamber worked with Congress to pass the Stop Counterfeiting in Manufactured Goods Act, legislation that closes loopholes that allowed counterfeiters to avoid prosecution in spite of having clearly profited from illegal activities. Our efforts abroad include the training of government and law enforcement officials in two key provinces in China, a ground-breaking consumer study in Brazil that fundamentally changed the way their government views the problem, and other global lobbying and education efforts.
In the next year, the Chamber will keep up the momentum with our efforts, including gathering measurable data on the economic impact of counterfeiting and piracy with studies in India, Brazil, Argentina and Guatemala , regular media coverage about counterfeiting and piracy as a national problem affecting jobs, health, safety, and the economy, committed Hill “champions” and the passage of key legislation that stiffens penalties and increases resources for law enforcement, a global investigations program with Interpol, expanded provincial programs in China and increased education and training of U.S. and foreign government and law enforcement officials.
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