Time to mount up against intellectual property thieves

George C. Landrith

There was a time in the rural West when the penalties for stealing horses or cattle were severe and meted out by ordinary citizens without a whole lot of judicial review.

I’m not advocating a return to frontier justice. It’s past time, though, for the U.S. to get tough with international criminals who steal Americans’ livelihood by violating intellectual property laws and flooding our country with counterfeit products.

Those shoddy counterfeits cost our economy an estimated $250 billion a year – almost as much as much as we’ll spend this year on the war against terror – and so far they have caused the elimination of 750,000 American jobs.

U.S. business has had enough of these thieves and the countries like China, Brazil and Russia that provide them with safe havens. That was very clear at a July 18th Capitol Hill briefing on how violations of intellectual property rights affect rural America, sponsored by the Frontiers of Freedom Institute.

Intellectual property protection is just as important to the Red River Valley as the Silicon Valley. Several speakers pointed out that small and medium-sized businesses trying to succeed in rural areas are especially vulnerable to trademark piracy and don’t have the resources to combat it.

Key representatives from the auto industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the free-market group Americans for Tax Reform made a strong case that politicians making indignant statements and diplomats protesting such theft won’t solve this growing problem for the whole country. Instead, they called for aggressive action in the form of legislation that has passed the House (H.R. 32) with bipartisan support for similar legislation pending in the Senate.

The legislation would make life tougher for counterfeiters by not only allowing for seizure of counterfeit goods, as is done now, but also seizing the means of production used to create those counterfeits. This should be a no-brainer for approval if the Senate isn’t distracted by other business.

There’s a limit, of course, as to how far the U.S. can crack down on counterfeiters and intellectual property thieves on our own soil. The counterfeit goods and the government policies that allow or actively encourage them originate in other countries. We need to light a fire under the World Trade Organization and use our diplomatic muscle to go toe-to-toe against the foreign governments that subsidize thievery and ignore international trademark agreements.

I’m a great believer in free trade, but free trade for U.S. producers has to include freedom from having their intellectual property stolen. The more clearly and emphatically we reinforce that point with real action, the better it will be for free trade across the globe and for American jobs and consumers. The only losers will be international thieves and counterfeiters.

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Mr. Landrith is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was Business Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Politics. He had a successful law practice in business and litigation. In 1994 and 1996, Mr. Landrith was a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia's Fifth Congressional District. He served on the Albemarle County School Board. Mr. Landrith is an adjunct professor at the George Mason School of Law. He is recognized as an authority on constitutional law and jurisprudence, federalism, global warming, and property rights.

george@ff.org