Via America’s Lawyer: Capitol Hill has introduced a bipartisan bill to hold online retailers accountable for selling counterfeit products. Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Major online retailers like Amazon could soon be held legally liable for selling counterfeit goods on their website. Now, okay, this story struck me this way. When it comes to money issues, okay, the Congress says, oh my God, we have counterfeiting going on and we have Wall Streeter’s that are losing money because of counterfeiting. And so we need to hold these counterfeiters responsible. They say that even at the same time that we let them sell pharmaceutical, narcotics, killing people all over the country without any regulations. We, we, human trafficking is at an all, all time high on the internet. Congress takes no action there. Give me your take on this, on this.
Farron Cousins: Well, it’s very interesting because obviously the internet is still the Wild West in terms of regulations. There’s nothing really there policing much of anything and honestly, the counterfeiters are a huge problem. And you have these sellers like Amazon who are letting people buy all these counterfeit goods from other countries with, you know, very lax regulations… sell it here and so yeah, that hurts American businesses. But of all the things to go ahead and tackle with the internet, you start with the one to say, oh my God, corporations are losing money. Let’s help them. No, we have people who are having their data, their location stolen from them and sold to the highest bidder every single day.
Mike Papantonio: That’s okay. That’s okay with Congress.
Farron Cousins: Right. We’re doing nothing about any of that, as you said, nothing about human trafficking or opioids or any of the other criminal activity happening on the internet. But God forbid corporations are losing a couple of dollars here and there because somebody wants to buy a knockoff watch.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: It’s crazy.
Mike Papantonio: And, and they actually, as they go forward with this, this legislation, it’s a good, it’s good legislators.
Farron Cousins: It is, it is.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, I’m glad they’re doing it. But for them to say this is more important, this is a lot more important than what the tech companies are doing to us, where they’re invading our lives, they’re taking everything we own as far as our identity. You name it, and then they’re selling it to some, to somebody else and, you know, Congress says, well that’s okay. This is America. That’s good capitalism. But where it comes to counterfeiting something like, you know, the, some of the stuff they’re counterfeiting it is serious. I mean, they’ve got, they’ve got some, some types of vitamins that are counterfeited. They’ve got…
Farron Cousins: Baby formula is one of the things that’s.
Mike Papantonio: Baby formula. It’s, that’s true. They need to do something about that. But they need to handle this in a way that we can look at and say, you know, they’re kind of doing this with an even hand. They’re holding the tech companies responsible for all the bad things that they’re responsible for right now.
Farron Cousins: Right, and what we need, honestly at this point, we need a new government agency. We need somebody in a department overlooking the internet these days. That, that’s what needs to happen. We need to have broad regulations, not just to make sure the internet is being fair, but to also protect the companies as well. We got to take care of them. But there is so much happening, so much that Congress is overlooking, for them to prioritize the profits of these companies and it’s because they give them money for their campaigns. It really kind of stings a bit as a consumer because I’ve had my data stolen, you know, and nobody, nobody’s doing anything about that.
Mike Papantonio: Farron Cousins, thank you for joining us. We’ll continue all of these stories because they get weirder almost every week. Thank you for joining me.
