Originally published on Medium.
On 24 September 2026, Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Ben Cline, together with Senators Thom Tillis, Chris Coons, Marsha Blackburn and Adam Schiff, introduced the DEFEND IP Act of 2026.
The acronym unpacks to Deterring Extraterritorial Foreign Exploitation of Networks Damaging Intellectual Property.
If you work in brand protection, that name will make you look up. Foreign exploitation. Networks. Damaging intellectual property. It reads like the bill a lot of people in this industry have been asking for since roughly 2019.
It is not that bill. It is a site-blocking bill for copyright piracy, and its own sponsors describe the harm in the plainest possible terms: movies, TV shows, art, and books. There is no trademark provision. There is no counterfeit goods provision. There is nothing in it about physical product at all.
I do not think that is a drafting oversight, and I do not think the sponsors are unserious people. Tillis and Coons in particular have spent years on counterfeits specifically. I think the omission is structural, and I think understanding why it is structural tells you more about the state of counterfeit enforcement than the bill itself does.
What the bill actually does
The mechanics are worth understanding because they are elegant, and because the elegance is the problem.
DEFEND IP merges two earlier efforts, Lofgren’s Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act in the House and Tillis’s Block BEARD in the Senate, into one bicameral vehicle. The Senate version is S. 5529, referred to the Judiciary Committee.
A rightsholder petitions a federal court to designate a site as a foreign digital piracy site. The standard is narrow on purpose: the site must be primarily designed for piracy, with no commercially significant purpose other than piracy, or be intentionally marketed as a piracy destination. Operators get twenty days to respond, though the court can issue an order ex parte. If the order issues, it runs for one year and is renewable.
The order then falls not on the site, which is offshore and unreachable, but on intermediaries inside the United States. Broadband providers with more than 50,000 subscribers, and public DNS resolvers with more than $100 million in annual revenue, which in practice means a small number of very large companies. VPN providers are explicitly carved out. Service providers get liability protection for complying, and they choose the least intrusive technical method.
That is a well-built machine. It accepts that you cannot reach the infringer, so it reaches the road instead. It scopes narrowly to avoid the collateral damage that killed SOPA in 2012. It puts a court between the accusation and the block. Reasonable people can still object to it, and many do, but nobody can call it lazy.
Now ask what happens if you point that machine at a counterfeit airbag.
The remedy stops at the edge of the object
Here is the asymmetry, and once you see it you cannot unsee it in any counterfeit enforcement conversation.
For a pirated film, blocking the channel is a complete remedy. The harm is the act of transmission. Cut the road and the harm stops at the moment the order takes effect. There is no residue. Nobody is driving around with a pirated movie installed in their steering column.
For a counterfeit inflator, blocking the channel is not a remedy at all. It is a way of reducing the rate at which the problem gets worse.
Every fake that already shipped is still out there. It is in a warehouse, on a shelf at an independent repair shop, or bolted into a car that will be sold three more times before it crashes. The eleven people who have died in the United States from DTN60DB inflators did not die because a website was reachable on the day they died. They died because a physical object entered the country at some earlier point, moved through a chain nobody logged, and was installed by somebody who had no way of knowing what it was.
eBay’s airbag ban, effective 24 September 2026, is the same shape of remedy. It is a good decision. It joins Amazon, Meta, Temu and Alibaba. It also does precisely nothing about the inventory already sold, and it pushes the remaining sellers to channels with less oversight, not more.
This is the thing that makes counterfeit physical goods different from every other category of infringement, and it is why the remedies keep disappointing. A pirated file has no afterlife. A counterfeit part has decades of one.
Why the law reaches for the channel anyway
So why does legislation keep targeting roads and platforms instead of items?
Because reaching the item requires the law to be able to identify the item, and it cannot.
Think about what a court order against a specific counterfeit good would even say. Seize all fake DTN60DB inflators. Fine, how does the officer at the port, or the technician at the bench, or the used car buyer in the driveway, determine which ones those are? NHTSA’s published guidance is to read a serial sequence off a connector label, which means the entire federal identification method for a part that has killed eleven people is: look at the writing on the sticker. DTN, the manufacturer whose mark is on the units, has said publicly that some of them may be counterfeit, which is to say the company cannot reliably distinguish its own product from imitations of it.
A legal system that cannot identify an object cannot write a rule that operates on that object. So it writes rules that operate on the things it can identify: a domain name, a corporate entity, a marketplace listing, a shipment manifest, a seller account. Those are all administrable. They are also all one step removed from the thing that hurts somebody.
Read that way, every channel-level remedy in counterfeit enforcement is an admission. Site blocking, platform liability, seller verification, de minimis reform, customs recordation: each of these is a workaround for the fact that nobody can look at the object and get a trustworthy answer. They are not the enforcement regime anyone would design if identification were solved. They are what you build when it is not.
The bill that would matter, and its record
There is a counterfeit analogue to DEFEND IP, and its history is the part of this story I would put in front of anyone who thinks the fix is legislative.
The SHOP SAFE Act, Stopping Harmful Offers on Platforms by Screening Against Fakes in E-commerce, would make online marketplaces contributorily liable for counterfeits sold by third parties, with a safe harbour for platforms that verify seller identity, screen listings, remove counterfeits, and cut off repeat offenders.
It was introduced in the 116th Congress as H.R. 6058 in 2020. It came back in the 117th as H.R. 3429 and S. 1843, and again as H.R. 5374, which was marked up in House Judiciary. It came back in the 118th. Coons and Tillis have reintroduced it since. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has argued throughout that the INFORM Consumers Act already covers the ground.
Six years. Four Congresses. One committee markup that I can find. No enactment.
Compare the trajectory. The piracy site-blocking idea died spectacularly as SOPA in 2012, went quiet for a decade, came back in narrower form as two separate bills, and has now been merged into a single bipartisan bicameral vehicle with six named sponsors across both chambers and both parties, in about eighteen months. SHOP SAFE has been sitting in roughly the same place since the first Trump administration.
I want to be careful not to over-read that. Different committees, different lobbies, different opposition. Hollywood is organised in a way that the brand protection community is not. But the simplest explanation is also the one that fits the structural argument above: the piracy bill is easier to write because everyone agrees what the infringing thing is when they see it. A file that is a copy of a film is a copy of a film. Nobody has to authenticate it.
The part where this gets worse before it gets better
Both DEFEND IP bills die in January 2027, when the 119th Congress ends, unless they move. As of this writing the Senate version sits in Judiciary with no markup scheduled.
That is also true of H.R. 8005, the Stop Pills That Kill Act, which I wrote about a fortnight ago. It passed the House on 15 September, went to the Senate on the 16th, was referred to Judiciary, and has not moved since. Same committee. Same clock.
This is the honest read on the pending column of anybody’s regulatory tracker, including mine. A bill referred to a committee in the autumn of an election year, with no markup on the calendar, is not a forthcoming obligation. It is an expiring one. The default outcome is that it dies quietly and somebody reintroduces a version of it in the 120th Congress, which is exactly what has happened to SHOP SAFE four times.
If your compliance plan, or your product roadmap, or your fundraising deck has a line in it that reads “regulatory tailwind,” check whether the thing you are pointing at has a markup date. Most of the time it does not, and a bill with no markup date is a press release with a bill number attached.
The sentence that costs us money
We sell authentication hardware, so here is the part where I say the thing that does not help me.
The DEFEND IP Act is not a tailwind for this business, and if you see a vendor in my category citing it in a deck, that is a reason to trust that deck less. It is a copyright bill. It would not touch a single counterfeit part. Adding it to a slide headed “the regulatory environment is moving our way” would be, at best, hoping the reader does not click through.
The second concession is larger. Even a perfect SHOP SAFE Act would not do what we do, and it would still be worth passing. Seller verification is genuinely valuable. Knowing who listed a part, and being able to find them again, and making the marketplace bear the cost of not knowing, changes behaviour at scale in a way no hardware does. If I had to choose between a well-enforced SHOP SAFE and universal adoption of our tag, for the specific problem of fakes on marketplaces, I would want the statute.
But they answer different questions, and conflating them is how this industry loses credibility. Seller verification tells you the identity of the person who sold you the object. It tells you nothing about the identity of the object. A verified seller with a clean record can be, and routinely is, shipping counterfeits they bought in good faith from a distributor who bought them in good faith from somebody who did not. The Ohio dealer who pleaded guilty this month to importing counterfeit Honda airbags was a licensed dealer with a real business and a real address. Verification would have found him. It would not have flagged a single one of the forty-four airbags before they were installed.
The Aeroz Angle
What we build is a secure NFC tag that answers a cryptographic challenge tied to that individual item when tapped with an ordinary phone. A photograph of the tag is a photograph. A recording of one valid answer does not reproduce the key that produced it.
Against the argument above, that changes exactly one variable, and I want to state it narrowly.
It makes the object identifiable without expert examination.
That is all. It does not stop a counterfeiter manufacturing. It does not close a border. It does not give a regulator a new power. What it does is remove the precondition that has been quietly shaping counterfeit enforcement law for twenty years, which is that nobody in the chain can look at a part and get a reliable answer, so every rule has to be written about something other than the part.
Consider what becomes writable if that precondition changes. A salvage retitling inspection that checks the inflator instead of the paperwork about the inflator. A recall that can be scoped to actual affected units instead of conceding, as NHTSA did in the DTN matter, that a list of affected vehicles is not available. A customs rule that operates on the item rather than the declaration. A marketplace policy that can distinguish a legitimate used part from a fake, which is the distinction eBay could not draw and which is why it had to ban the entire category, honest sellers included.
None of those rules exist. None of them are proposed. I am not claiming any of them are coming, and I am specifically not claiming that any current or pending law requires what we sell, because none does, and I have said so in every piece in this series.
What I am claiming is narrower and I think harder to argue with. The reason the enforcement toolkit for counterfeit physical goods looks the way it does, all channels and intermediaries and seller accounts and nothing that touches the item, is not that legislators lack ambition. It is that the item cannot currently answer for itself. Every remedy on the table routes around that fact.
Congress spent this month building a careful, well-scoped, bipartisan machine for reaching an infringer it cannot otherwise touch, and pointing it at a film.
The eleventh person to die from a counterfeit inflator died on 27 August. There is no machine pointed at that, because there is nothing to point it at. You cannot block a part.
You can, however, make one that can be asked.