Washington this week is taking on the problem of intellectual property theft and its consequences on a global scale. In honor of Valentine’s Day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Monday announced it has taken down 18 websites selling counterfeit luxury goods as part of its “Operation In Our Sites” initiative aimed at counterfeiting and piracy online. [...]

Adding to several recent reports that are shedding light on the cost of piracy is today’s release by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) predicting that by 2015, the annual global economic impact of piracy and counterfeiting will reach $1.7 trillion and put 2.5 million jobs at risk each year. The report adds further detail [...]

Vice President Joe Biden and IP Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel today called a meeting of corporate and non-profit entities that are working to forge voluntary agreements to protect consumers from fraud, piracy and counterfeit goods online (VP, DOJ, Stakeholders Huddle on IP). Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, were among the [...]

New research released today by the firm MarkMonitor sheds light on the magnitude of both digital piracy and online sales of counterfeit products, sampling just 22 brands that collectively were pirated or counterfeited on sites, generating 53 billion visits annually. For digital piracy, the research was narrowed to a limited number of media companies to [...]

To holiday shoppers, Cyber Monday is when you use your work computer to do a bit of online shopping, hoping for some good savings. Thank you to the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (its Immigration and Customs Enforcement division) for providing their own spin on Cyber Monday — a [...]

“Protecting intellectual property is a top priority for the United States – for President Obama, for me, and for America’s law enforcement community.” Thus spoke U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday in Hong Kong. The Attorney General’s remarks are but the latest in a long list of strong endorsements of the rights of copyright owners [...]

It was a welcome convergence of messages Tuesday as the Obama Administration’s key point person for intellectual property emphasized the same point being made by a bipartisan coalition of U.S. Senators on Capitol Hill — something must be done to cut off the flow of illicit profits to web sites, often offshore, that are profiting [...]

While it will go without saying to readers of this blog that I feel there are many harms that can come from the hacking of a Blu-Ray disc, you can hear me make that case on television by following this link: http://bit.ly/dmpCRF In the interview I point out that it only takes one hacker to [...]

Thursday featured many Obama Administration officials speaking strongly about the importance of copyright enforcement at an event sponsored by the U.S. Commerce Department, but enforcement actions on Wednesday by the Administration spoke even louder than words. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other state and federal agencies, with the new “Operation in our Sites,” cut [...]

As we noted at the time, yesterday was first-of-its-kind comprehensive strategic intellectual property enforcement plan, prepared by a White House team in the Obama Administration led by U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel. It’s a pretty broad report, and lots of people are pouring through it, but we were pleased to be a part [...]