How to Steal an American Job

JOHN MORTON: Here's how to steal an American job.
First, set up shop overseas – a factory with low-paid workers, sewing machines maybe.
Take an American product, an American innovation, and copy it.
Shoes, bags, jerseys, electronics, pills, DVD's – just knock 'em off on the cheap.
Set up a fake website. Pretend you're selling high-priced goods.
Take your product to the port, put it on a ship to America…
Call some of your criminal friends in the U.S. community. And get them to sell your counterfeit product,
with little regard for the consequences.
Don't worry about the workers at the American companies you're underselling.
Why should you care if they ever find another other job in today's tough economy?
Forget about paying pensions or healthcare, or taxes – you're in the clear!
Now. Here's how to save an American job.
IPR enforcement.
The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center is led by Homeland Security Investigations, part of ICE.
The Center includes partners in 19 domestic and international law enforcement agencies.
Waging war against IP thieves.
All these agencies work in tight coordination – a network that spans the globe.
We and our partners work overseas…at the ports…in the cities…busting IP theft wherever bogus products are made, shipped, or sold.
And the confiscated goods end up in warehouses like this one.
Take a look at this. A real Coach bag? No. A counterfeit.
Real ibuprofen? No. It's chalk. Not the kind of thing that's going to make anybody healthy.
This – an adapter. Allows you to hack into video games and steal the game for free. That's illegal, that's IP theft.
And this - "Real Timberland dot com?" Nothing real, nothing "Timberland" about it.
But I'm proud to say that the IPR Center and all of its partners done phenomenal work this year.
And every time they make a bust, every time they make an arrest, an American job is saved.
Take a look at some of the news coverage we've gotten across all our partner agencies.
The Feds are cracking down on illegal shopping websites, just in time for the holiday season. Yesterday the government announced it has seized and blocked 82 websites…
82 websites.
82 websites are suddenly gone.
Here is a Louis Vuitton purse that would normally sell for about a thousand bucks, online for just 45 dollars.
So far, "Operation Interception" has seized more than 36,000 unlicensed jerseys, T-shirts, ballcaps and the like.
Custom Enforcement agents simultaneously swept in a Super Bowl crackdown across the U.S.
Kumar Kibble is charged with protecting our borders from illicit trafficking.
Fake drugs are a big threat, and it is an exploding threat.
FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg.
In certain countries, somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of really important drugs are in fact counterfeit.
Tonight on Nightline… Officials are trying to keep up.
I believe that the smuggler is pretty sure that if they send 20 containers, that a few of them are going to go through.
Chanel, Gucci, even Hello Kitty.
One of the biggest counterfeit busts in Tampa, ever.
Theft of innovative ideas, or the sale of counterfeit, defective, and dangerous goods has been perceived as business as usual.
Not any more.
In 2011, the IPR Center initiated over twelve hundred cases.
That's a 17 percent increase over the previous year.
Indictments rose 64 percent. And agents made over 500 arrests.
We continued Operation In Our Sites, targeting websites that sell counterfeit products and pirated content.
We're proud of the results: 200 domain names were seized.
And we turned this… Into this. Nearly 76 million people have seen this banner, and this PSA, when they tried to reach seized websites.
(Show the world that piracy doesn't work.)
This year, we expanded our partnerships.
We welcomed six new agencies to the HSI-led task force.
We launched a new website at iprcenter.gov.
And we conducted hundreds of outreach events, formal presentations, and meetings,
reaching 17 thousand industry representatives.
Intellectual property theft comes at a high price.
Hard-working Americans lose their jobs.
Companies suffer losses.
American innovation is lost.
Consumers' health is jeopardized.
Our war fighters are put at risk.
The multi-agency IPR Center is the government's leading weapon in combating global intellectual property theft.
In 2012, we will continue to expand our partnerships, foster awareness,
and most importantly, we will continue to hunt down IP thieves,
whether they're in the United States, or overseas.
We're making a difference.
Saving jobs, protecting innovation, protecting people,
catching criminals.