
Keynote speaker Alaina Van Horn opens the LES Annual Meeting 2024 in New Orleans.
Viewpoints: The Evolving Landscape of IP Border Enforcement: A Review of Domestic and International Trends by Alaina Van Horn
In a compelling keynote on her agency’s role in preventing the importation of counterfeit and infringing goods, Alaina Van Horn, Chief Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), opened the LES Annual Meeting 2024.
Van Horn underscored the CBP’s role in enforcing intellectual property (IP) laws. She highlighted that with 60,000 employees, CBP is the largest federal agency, while the Office of Trade, her division, has 1,100 employees. “We have a statutory duty to render objective determinations on these different areas: classification, valuation, marking, country of origin, intellectual property, enforcement, penalty, restrictive, merchandise, admissibility, and navigation laws.”

LES Leaders with Annual Meeting Keynote speaker: Arpi Siyahian (left), Alaina Van Horn, Ann Cannoni and Bob Held.
She emphasized her department’s worldwide mission to train other customs agencies, saying, “Our international footprint with regulations and rulings is well represented.” Part of the office is involved with the World Customs Organization, and her team chairs the OECD, which counters illicit trade. They also teach Interpol investigators and provide international capacity training to U.S. trading partners. Van Horn emphasized the importance of international cooperation, noting that CBP trained 66 customs administrations worldwide last year.
A trend that interests her personally in working with different cultures is that collectivist societies (think China and India) have a harder time accepting intellectual property rights as private rights. They tend to have weaker or more lax border enforcement and general intellectual property enforcement.
She emphasized the importance of international treaties, such as TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights), in guiding national enforcement regimes. She also highlighted the role of customs in safeguarding borders and combating counterfeiting and piracy, noting that most infringing goods are made abroad and must move across borders.
To encourage international alignment with U.S. standards, Van Horn presented CBP’s International Advocacy Priority Policies, which include:
- Implementing centralized electronic databases for border enforcement requests.
- Establishing a minimum three-year term for recordation to improve data tracking.
- Removing the TRIPS Article 60 de minimis exemption for small shipments often bypassing enforcement.
- Extending border controls to all goods movements, including exports.
- Expanding customs oversight within Free Trade Zones (FTZs) to curb illicit trade.
Van Horn illustrated examples of a correlation between IP enforcement and GDP growth rate. She pointed to Poland, which has been called the Silicon Valley of Europe, for its friendliness to start-ups and protection of IP. “They’re constantly improving the business climate. And they’ve always had this tradition of protecting intellectual property.” Also mentioning that many tech companies now have an office in Krakow.
Another example is Ethiopia’s improvement of its intellectual property environment. She said, “In 2007, they started trademarking and licensing their coffee as a geographical indicator. Starbucks gave $100 million to help Ethiopia obtain the intellectual property rights that would allow them to monetize their greatest export, which is coffee.” Because of this, between 2007 and 2009, the country doubled the income of coffee producers and doubled the number of employed people.
Van Horn addressed the complexities surrounding Foreign Trade Zones (FTZs), highlighting the challenges of defining and regulating these areas. “One of the primary issues is the lack of a universally accepted definition for FTZs,” she noted. “If you look at the global landscape, the United States is something of an outlier in how we manage these zones, which we term ‘Foreign Trade Zones.’”
She explained that FTZs can vary widely, from full-scale cities designated as free ports to single factories operating as special economic zones. While the U.S. has around 300 FTZs, the number has skyrocketed globally from around 50 in the 1970s to over 4,000 today, making FTZs an increasingly pressing issue in international trade.
“Multilateral organizations have attempted to set guidelines, but without a universally accepted definition or standardized operations for FTZs, enforcement remains challenging,” Van Horn explained. She pointed out that FTZs frequently appear in U.S. reports on intellectual property enforcement, such as the USTR’s 2018 Notorious Markets List, which focused heavily on FTZs and their potential role in illicit trade.
Following her address, a workshop titled “Working with Customs Agencies Worldwide” explored the logistics of collaborating with U.S. CBP and international customs authorities, offering attendees practical insights.
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About Licensing Executives Society (USA & Canada), Inc. (LES):
Established in 1965, LES (USA & Canada) is one of the longest running professional societies supporting the development of members engaged in the creation, commercial development, and orderly transfer of intellectual property. LES members include business executives, lawyers, accountants, consultants, and scientists and engineers; who represent innovation-oriented enterprises of all sizes, professional services firms, universities, and government labs. LES is the largest of 43 global member societies of the Licensing Executives Society International, Inc. (LESI). For more information about LES, visit www.lesusacanada.org.
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