U.S. Was Winning War Against China's Intellectual Property Theft

Twelve years ago, the Chinese put my brother-in-law, Frank Williams, out of business. Frank was one of the last costume jewelry designers in Providence, R.I., a city where costume jewelry had once been a major industry. His small company, which he’d owned since 1978, had been profitable for its first 20 years. But in the late 1990s, the profits began to dry up.

Frank soon realized what was happening: Customers who had once bought large orders were buying small orders, and sending every new piece Frank designed to China, where Chinese manufacturers replicated them en masse for one-third the price. Although the Chinese knock-offs had been shoddy at first, by the early 2000s, they were every bit as good as Frank’s originals. “There was nothing we could make in the U.S. that couldn’t be made far less expensively in China,” he once told me. So in 2006, he bowed to the inevitable, and closed his company.