Crossing Canal Street

[The following is a personal contribution and does not necessarily reflect the official views of Applied DNA Sciences]

OK, full disclosure:  we residents don’t like Canal St.   That’s the eight or so blocks of Canal St. known to the tour bus crowd as the “Canal St. Market” and to the world as New York’s Counterfeit Central.   Yes, we are aware of the gritty, diverse, hustle and bustle narrative.  Try living there. 

From our perch, the street has the flavor of an anything-goes thieves’ den. Whole blocks are periodically shut down for selling fakes, reopening soon under different names.  Or not, thus adding to the desolation row effect.  Human figures huddle under dark awnings.  What’s worse, it is unarguably the most difficult pedestrian crossing ever devised by mankind.

And so it has gone for years, just one of eight million stories in the naked city. Even as the global counterfeiting black market has become increasingly efficient, and dangerous, the Street of Crime has survived and prospered amid the New Yorkers’ credo:  live and let live.

So what, you may legitimately ask.  Doesn’t Applied DNA Sciences have its hands full with the real threats from the counterfeit trade?  Protecting against counterfeit microchips being slipped into government supply chains, for example, with the danger of a defective chip bringing down a weapons system, or opening the door to outright sabotage.   Or, commercially,  our company protecting historic industries like wool and cotton spinners and manufacturers, who are existentially threatened by a huge flood of counterfeits from abroad.  Surely more critical than handbags…

 Well, the story is not that simple, as New York City Council District 1 rep Margaret Chin tells it.  Chin’s district, which includes my very own apartment building, encompasses the Canal Street market.   With a new bill, Chin and five colleagues propose to punish buyers of counterfeit goods -not just makers, or sellers- but buyers.  The bill makes that transaction a Class A misdemeanor for shoppers.   If you’re not an avid reader of New York’s criminal code, know that we’re talking $1000 or so in fines and up to a year in jail.   Quite a traffic ticket.

But Chin has had it.  She points out that counterfeiting is an has gone global, with local revenues feeding highly organized networks that in turn may finance other criminal activities.  Then there is the linkage, made by former Mayor Giuliani and others, between the funding chain for terrorists and the counterfeit trade.   Globally, counterfeits attract organized crime since the margins are typically multiples of the illicit drug trade.   Illicit tax-free revenue from fakes, according to the International Chamber of Commerce, will soon total $1.3 trillion annually.  Her implied point: Canal St. is tip-of-the-iceberg stuff.

I myself would add probable child labor abuse into the picture.  Anyone have a wild guess as to who works in the sweatshops that produce all those fake bags?

For all that, the proposal has been met with an indignant howl. 

“..class warfare!” led the coverage in AM New York for April 27.  “… for many low-income people, an attack on their “Channel, Prana and Furberry” is yet another attack on them,”  the paper opined.

And this from the Yahoo blog site: “…in a city with such a huge tourism market, are they really prepared to imprison their customers?”  (Yahoo Associated Content, April 26).

Many city officials, meanwhile, have been less than enthusiastic.

It’s a common refrain.  The counterfeit black market breeds in places where there is little or no monitoring by authorities, whether for lack of resources or lack of motivation.  As much as it needs willing consumers, the black market counts on an atmosphere of tolerance, and—I’ll say it--a lack of social mores.  It is not, simply put, morally right to buy criminally copied goods.    

Fashion companies  can spend decades building a brand.  Like it or not, it is their intellectual property, justly earned.  (Disclosure two: I work for an anti-counterfeiting company whose business is helping those companies protect themselves by a system of DNA-based authentication.)

Nor is it economically healthy to tolerate counterfeits.   New York continues to be a world center of fashion.  Is it not more economically logical to do everything we can to support that long-time catalyst of New York’s economy then to attend the sensibilities of tourists who make their way to one cheap market downtown?

Ironically, the bill isn’t actually all that draconian.  It targets only counterfeits that display a brand’s specific trademark.  This means that if tourists are just dying to spend ten bucks on a cheap hand bag that will fall apart in two months, they could still buy no-label knock-offs under the new law. 

But gosh, would it kill anyone to buy a bag from one of the hundreds of up and coming, young and talented, but unrecognized fashion and accessory designers, living and selling their wares all over Brooklyn,  Astoria, and the Lower East Side?  Am I dreaming that a guidebook (or city-sponsored program) which showed the way to those bargains would help tourism in an innovative, sensible way, with long-term economic benefit? 

And hey, it would be a heck of a lot easier to cross Canal St.