Because if there was any rationale for creating the Department of Homeland Security, it was to ensure that America was not threatened by unlicensed panties suggestive of baseball-team logos. [Tim Cushing, Techdirt]
Because if there was any rationale for creating the Department of Homeland Security, it was to ensure that America was not threatened by unlicensed panties suggestive of baseball-team logos. [Tim Cushing, Techdirt]
9 Comments
Blessedly they were not pink panties.
What, no SWAT team?
Bob
More mission creep from our creepiest agency. Now they’re doing panty raids. There’s no law, there’s no policy, there’s no argument that will stop this behavior. They’ve been given free rein by Congress and the Administration, and they’ll never take it back. Get used to it folks, we’re a different country now. It’s still Ok to hate them. We owe it to ourselves.
I’d feel a lot more comfortable letting a judge decide whether linking the K and the C violates the trademark than leaving it to cops.
This really isn’t anything new. I recall after the Tampa Bay Bucs won the “Really Big Game” in 2002, some Custom’s agents in Tampa seized underwear with Bucs logos on it. Not because of an NFL license issue, but because the underwear was made in China and there was some sort of import paperwork problem with the products.
I’m not sure what Homeland Security is doing. They appear to be poaching on the FIB’s turf. FIB has jurisdiction over copyright and trademark piracy. It sounds like a righteous bust, though.
The people hopping on this case are puzzling. Conservatives, myself included, support intellectual property laws. These folks were in clear violation of it.
Now why the DHS needs to be involved, and why can’t it be settled in civil court is the question to ask. But it is clear that these panty folks were stealing someone’s IP.
This is one of those things that kind of makes sense, if you turn your head, squint, and think like a bureaucrat. Most IP-infringing and counterfeit merchandise is imported from overseas. It is easier to intercept shipments of such at the border, especially because they are then subject to the border-search exception to the 4th amendment. Thus primary enforcement of the statutes criminalizing IP infringement was assigned to the Customs Bureau of the Treasury Department.
AS part of the creation of the DHS, Customs enforcement and the Immigration and Naturalization Service were merged (why there’s only one stop in the airport now) and placed into the DHS. Thus the Feds who enforce criminal trademark infringement are part of DHS instead of Justice or Treasury.
Now why Customs and Border Protection (the merged bureau above), FBI, Secret Service, ATF, Federal Marshals Service, and the criminal enforcement arms of virtually all of the other agencies can’t be brought together under a single umbrella organization is a different question.
The root problem may be the bombastic name that G.W.Bush chose for his post 9-11 umbrella agency. The public suspect something phony when run-of-the-mill police activities are hyped as “homeland security.”