Notorious Markets submission to USTR: On October 1, AAFA submitted annual comments to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) as part of USTR’s 2018 Special 301 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets, which identifies foreign physical and online marketplaces that engage in and facilitate substantial copyright piracy and trademark counterfeiting. This is an essential part of the hard work that AAFA conducts to defend and protect American intellectual property. Among other ecommerce platforms and physical marketplaces, AAFA identified amazon.co.uk (United Kingdom), amazon.ca (Canada), and amazon.de (Germany) in the submission. Our specific concerns are expressed in yesterday’s submission and our press statement.

NAFTA renegotiated and re-named: On Sunday, September 30, the Trump administration announced a deal with Canada to complete a trilateral update of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — now called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). AAFA has provided a detailed assessment to the AAFA Government Relations Committee. To learn more about committee access, contact AAFA’s Steve Lamar.

AAFA supports exclusion process for China Tariffs: On September 26, AAFA joined a letter with dozens of other associations, asking USTR to institute an exclusion process for the $200 billion list of U.S. imports from China currently being charged a punitive 10% tariff.