20 March 2008

GAO Sees Need for Better IPR Enforcement Efforts by CBP, Other Agencies

This article is excerpted from the 20 March 2008 edition of “WorldTrade\Interactive”.

 The Government Accountability Office recently sent to Congress a report finding that better efforts to assess the effectiveness of federal intellectual property rights enforcement initiatives could yield further improvements. Among other things, the report points out problems with U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s enforcement of exclusion orders in Section 337 IPR infringement cases. The report also notes that CBP is collecting only about one percent of the IPR-related penalties it assesses.

Resources. The GAO states that federal IPR enforcement agencies confront growing challenges in protecting the U.S. against counterfeit and pirated goods. Despite the fact that IPR crimes appear to be on the rise, IPR enforcement is generally not a top agency priority. As a result, few resources are dedicated solely to this task, and agencies may spend fewer resources on IPR enforcement than on higher priority issues. The GAO notes, however, that within the scope of the IPR activities they do undertake these agencies typically give priority to IPR crimes that pose risks to public health and safety, such as those involving counterfeit pharmaceuticals, batteries and car parts.

Evaluation and Analysis. While federal IPR enforcement activity has generally increased in recent years, agencies have taken little initiative to improve their data or evaluate their enforcement activity in ways that would enable them to identify and track certain trends or enforcement outcomes, such as regional variations in enforcement activity and types of IPR-infringing goods commonly encountered….