HOMELAND SECURITY AGENTS VISIT TOY STORE
So far as she knows, Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox hasn't been
passing any state secrets to sinister foreign governments, or violating
obscure clauses in the Patriot Act.
So, she was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security to her small store in the quiet Columbia
River town of St. Helens, just north of Portland.
"I was shaking in my shoes," Cox said of the September phone call. "My
first thought was the government can shut your business down on a whim, in
my opinion. If I'm closed even for a day that would cause undue stress."
When the two agents arrived at the store, the lead agent asked Cox
whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an
illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time.
He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to
make sure she complied.
After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube,
the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told
her that Rubik's Cube's patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not
infringe on the rival toy's trademark.
Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint
filed in the agency's intellectual property rights center in Washington,
D.C. "One of the things that our agency's responsible for doing is
protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems
and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic
impli-cations," she said.
Six weeks after her brush with Homeland Security, Cox says she is still
bewildered by the experience. "Aren't there any terrorists out there?" she
said.
<http://hometown.aol.com/newsoftheforce/myhomepage/military.html> News of
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[ HomelandSecurity ] Learn more about terrorist threats:
http://geocities.com/ac5jw/ygl/tt.html
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