California Apparel News

SAN FRANCISCO—Counterfeiters are coming out of the woodwork these days, but there is plenty that can be done about it.

That’s what attendees learned at the “Knock It Off! Brands and the Counterfeiting Quandary” workshop hosted by the American Apparel & Footwear Association on March 24 at the Levi Strauss & Co. headquarters in San Francisco.

The day-long event kicked off with a guided tour of the Port of Oakland and presentations by enforcement teams and customs and import specialists that focused on apparel and footwear. Back at the Levi Strauss headquarters, workshops focused on profiles of select brands’ global response to counterfeiting and the role of the Internet, e-commerce sites that sell counterfeit goods, and how social marketing relates to counterfeiting and contributes to legal issues online.

Kurt Courtney, the AAFA’s government-relations manager, discussed the ongoing battle for design copyright legislation, including the proposed Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act, the compromise bill backed by the AAFA and Council of Fashion Designers of America that replaces the CFDA’s previously proposed effort, the Design Piracy and Prohibition Act, which was stymied in Congress.

“I’m happy to report hellip; that the [DPPA] will probably never be reintroduced again in Congress,” Courtney said. The IDPPPA, which has a narrower scope and, unlike the DPPA, doesn’t require registration and uses an infringement standard of “substantially identical,” has yet to be introduced to the Senate this year. Courtney added that there are no current plans to introduce the bill to the House yet.

Going rogue

Another key topic for the AAFA is rogue websites, which are described as e-tail websites that sell counterfeit goods. These sites often sell directly to the consumer, sometimes masquerading as legitimate retail channels, and are hard to track because they ship single items to consumers—not large containers that are more likely to raise flags. “This is the big one,” Courtney said. There is still a lot of controversy about bills that have been written to deal with rogue websites, he said.

One such proposed bill, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, was written to authorize the Department of Justice to file a civil action against a rogue website and seek a preliminary order from the court that the domain name is being used in the trafficking of [counterfeit] material. The Department of Justice must then publish notice of the action, and it would have to prove to a federal judge that the website meets clear criteria that focus on the site’s substantial role in online piracy and/ or counterfeiting. “Basically, this would mean you go to the Department of Justice [and] the department will work to shut down the most egregious sites,” Courtney said. According to the language of the bill, once the court finds that the website is a rogue site, the court could order the seizure of the site if it is in the United States or, if it’s a foreign site, order American businesses such as Internet service providers and credit card companies not to do business with that site, thus cutting off its access to the domestic market.

“The most notorious market out there is the Internet right now—it’s the Wild West,” Courtney said, and many rogue websites that are being targeted are from China. “China itself has a renewed [intellectual property rights] campaign that they’re working on because they’re scared. They’re actually scared of losing business from us, and using intellectual property violations as a method to really get them to get their act together is really a great thing and we’re making some progress.”

Bringing the big guns

Richard Halverson, the unit chief for outreach and training at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, gave an overview of his organization and its “In Our Sites” initiative.

The IPR Center is a government agency that is a part of the Department of Homeland Security, Halverson said, and run by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations. According to its website, as a task force, the IPR Center uses the expertise of its member agencies to share information, develop initiatives, coordinate enforcement actions and conduct investigations related to IP theft.

Halverson said 60 percent of the IPR’s seizures in 2010 came from China and the No. 1 commodity seized, for the fourth year in a row, was footwear.

In 2010, the IPR launched “In Our Sites,” a new initiative aimed at Internet counterfeiting and piracy. Sites that are found to be perpetrating criminal copyright violations have their domain names seized by the IPR.

So far, the IPR has focused the initiative on market segments such as music, films and Super Bowl–related merchandise and has taken down approximately 140 domain names.

Footwear is expected to be the focus of a future “In Our Sites” initiative, Halverson said, and he encouraged brands to alert the IPR Center of sites that are trafficking counterfeiting goods or participating —Erin Barajas