Originally published on Medium.
H.R. 4930 adds the container and the packing materials to what CBP can share. EU brand alerts fell to 1,305.
The House passed H.R. 4930 on 27 April 2026, a bill whose long title is to expand the sharing of information on suspected intellectual property violations in trade. It adds the shipping container and the packing materials to what Customs can photograph and send you.
Trade press reported on 13 November that the Senate passed it without opposition three days earlier, and that it now awaits the President’s signature. The industry associations welcomed it, correctly. It is a sensible bill and it solves a real bottleneck.
It also quietly restates something about how counterfeit enforcement in the United States actually works, and the restatement is the reason to read it.
Customs is not getting better at deciding what is fake. It is getting a faster way to ask you.
What the bill actually changes
The bill amends section 628A of the Tariff Act of 1930, at 19 U.S.C. 1628a. It is short. Three changes do the work.
First, it widens the list of things Customs can share. The existing law already refers to “images of the merchandise.” The bill strikes “and its packaging and labels” and inserts “, its packaging, packing materials, containers, and labels,” and separately inserts “, packing materials, containers,” after “its packaging.”
So the photograph is not new. What is new is the container and the packing materials, which is to say the parts of a shipment that tell you about the route rather than the product.
Second, it adds a new paragraph allowing Customs to provide “nonpublic information about the merchandise that was generated by an online marketplace or other similar market platform, express consignment operator, freight forwarder, or any other entity that plays a role in the sale or importation of merchandise.” That is the genuinely significant provision, and almost nobody is reporting it. Marketplace and carrier data, generated by commercial parties, passed to a private rights holder by the government.
Third, it widens who can receive all this, adding “any other party with an interest in the merchandise, as determined appropriate by the Commissioner.”
And one more line, easy to skip. In the matter preceding the list, the bill strikes “suspects” and inserts “has a reasonable suspicion.”
The threshold change is not what the coverage says
That last amendment has been described in trade coverage as lowering the bar. Read as text, it is not obviously either.
“Suspects” is a verb with no defined content. “Reasonable suspicion” is a term of art with a body of law behind it. Substituting the second for the first replaces an unbounded discretion with a standard a court could review. Whether that makes sharing easier or harder in practice depends on how Customs currently reads “suspects,” which is not something the amendment tells you.
We are flagging it because every secondary account we read treated it as a loosening, and the text does not say that. It is the kind of detail that gets repeated into a deck and then into a compliance assumption.
What the bill does not do
Here is the shape of it, and it is worth saying plainly.
There is no penalty in this bill. There is no duty on anyone who receives the information. There is no effective date provision. The only obligation it creates runs the other way: Customs must notify the recipient of the nonpublic information it transmits, under regulations the Secretary will write.
It is a pipe. It moves more information, from more sources, to more parties, faster.
Which leaves the question the pipe delivers to your desk.
The photograph arrives. Then what?
A container is held. An officer forms a reasonable suspicion. Under the amended section, you get images of the merchandise, its packaging, its packing materials, the container, and the labels, plus whatever the marketplace and the freight forwarder generated about the shipment.
Now somebody at your company has to look at a photograph of a box and say whether it is yours.
That is the whole system, and it has always been the whole system. This series has recorded the same structure in four jurisdictions. South Africa’s Counterfeit Goods Act has the brand supply the determination and the inspector test only whether the brand’s suspicion is reasonable. Ghana’s CID Director-General said in Accra last week that investigations “depend on forensic expertise, intelligence and cooperation with rights holders.” A Karnataka regulator holding a suspected counterfeit vial reportedly could not test it, because the analysis needed a reference standard only the brand owner could supply. And at Chicago O’Hare, when officers pulled two hundred Cartier watches, the parcel had to go to Customs’ own Centres of Excellence and Expertise before anyone could call them inauthentic.
The state has the goods. The state does not have the answer. The answer is held by a brand, in a building, by a person who may or may not be able to produce it quickly.
H.R. 4930 makes that request arrive faster and with better attachments. It does nothing about the reply.
The number that should worry the people cheering
Set the bill against the only measurement we have of how brands currently respond.
In the European Union, detentions rose sharply in the most recent reporting year. Over the same period, rights-holder alerts filed through the EU’s IP Enforcement Portal fell to 1,305 from 1,981, a drop of about a third. That figure comes from trade coverage of the EUIPO and Commission report rather than from the report itself, which we have not read, and we flag it as such because it is load-bearing here.
If it is right, it describes an uncomfortable direction. Enforcement capacity is going up. Brand participation is going down.
There are decent reasons for that. Alert programmes are administrative work, the volumes are enormous, and a brand protection team of four people cannot triage photographs all day. But the direction matters, because every statute in this field, including the one Congress just passed, assumes the rights holder is a willing and capable responder.
And the baseline is already thin. On the EU’s own figures, border detentions amount to 0.66 per mille of third-country imports. The system catches well under one per cent, and then asks the brand to adjudicate what it caught.
The test, and it takes an afternoon
Here is something concrete, and it costs nothing but a meeting.
Take one of your own products. Photograph the outer carton, the packing materials and the shipping container the way a Customs officer would: on a dock, under bad light, with no serial visible and no documentation attached. Send those images to whoever in your organisation would receive a Customs notification.
Then time how long it takes to come back with a defensible answer, and watch what they ask for.
If they ask for the lot number, you have learned that your identification capability depends on data that will not be in the photograph. If they ask to see the product itself, you have learned that your answer requires physical access that a notification does not give you. If they say yes or no in ten minutes with confidence, ask them what they were actually looking at, and whether a competent counterfeiter could reproduce it.
Most teams discover that what they identify is the artwork. Artwork is the thing counterfeiters have been getting right for a decade.
This is the same question as the recall question
We published a self-assessment this week built on a different number, recall width: how much product you would have to pull if a withdrawal were forced on you. It asks ten questions, each drawn from a documented case, and works out whether your answer would come down to units, lots, a production window, or everything still in date.
The photograph question belongs to the same family. Both are cases where somebody outside your company asks you something under time pressure, and your answer is determined entirely by records and capabilities you built, or did not build, long before.
How wide would your recall be? Three minutes, nothing collected, no sign-up.
What we are not saying
We are not saying the bill is bad. It is a narrow, sensible amendment that removes a real friction, it passed both chambers without opposition, and the industry support for it is well founded.
We are not saying Customs should be adjudicating authenticity itself. It should not, it cannot at volume, and a system that routes the question to the party who actually knows the product is the right design. Our point is about the reply, not the request.
We are not saying brands are failing. The alert figure is one number, from a secondary reading of a report we have not opened, and declining participation has explanations that are not negligence.
And we are not saying our own field answers the photograph. It does not. A verification layer answers a question about a unit somebody is holding. Nobody at Customs is tapping your packaging during a notification, and a photograph of a carton is not a unit in anyone’s hand. What identity changes is upstream of this: fewer units that can present as yours in the first place.
Who meets this problem
The brand protection lead who will receive more notifications after this bill than before, with the same headcount.
The quality manager asked to confirm from an image, who knows that the only thing distinguishable in it is the print.
The customs officer who formed a reasonable suspicion, did everything right, and is now waiting on an email.
The marketplace or freight forwarder whose own nonpublic data is about to be handed to a rights holder, which is a provision nobody has written about and somebody should.
And the general counsel who will be asked, at some point, why a shipment was released.
What would have had to be provable
For the photograph to be answerable, the thing in it would have to carry something a camera can capture and a counterfeiter cannot reproduce. Artwork is not that. A printed code is not that, because a printed code photographs identically whether it is valid or copied.
What is actually provable from a picture is narrow, and being honest about that is more useful than pretending otherwise: you can establish that a carton is inconsistent with your current artwork, or that a container route is inconsistent with your distribution. Both are useful. Neither is proof.
The bill moves the question to you faster. The question was always going to arrive. The only variable that was ever in your control is whether anybody at your company can answer it.
Aeroz tracks counterfeit enforcement, recalls and supply chain failures in regulated industries, three times a week. Follow for the next one. aeroz.io · [email protected]