The U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, (AKA “copyright czar”) has made public an ambitious new federal government strategy to combat online piracy and the sale of counterfeit products.
Espinel said the plan will improve government efforts at prevention and detection as well as the prosecution of intellectual property thieves. It takes aim at the foreign websites that violate U.S. intellectual property laws.
The plan lays out responsibilities of federal government agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, the FBI and the Department of Justice. The agencies will get added manpower and other resources to detect and intellectual property theft and prosecute the thieves, Espinel said.
Story here.
I would like to think that this initiative, coupled with added vigilance by domain registrars will go a long way toward cleaning up the illegal pharma and product knock-off sites that are so extensively advertised by spam email. Hopefully, the KnujOn report we blogged about yesterday will bring pressure on Domain Registrars to shut down the ISPs that protect crminal Internet operators.
Tom Kelchner