Should People Who Buy Counterfeit Handbags Be Arrested?

You know that "Kate Spade" bag whose label you've been painstakingly re-gluing on for the past few years? It's one step closer to getting you jail time and a hefty fine: a bill criminalizing the purchase of counterfeit goods that's been bouncing around City Council for the past few years got another hearing in the City Council yesterday.

Cops have been cracking down on counterfeit handbag vendors for a few years now, much to the chagrin of all those middle school girls whose popularity in homeroom rests on the quality of their faux-Tory Burch clutches. And for the past two years, City Councilwoman Margaret Chin's been saying it's not just the sellers who are responsible for the brand-name black market—which she says costs the city at least $1 billion in tax revenue, hurts designers and legitimate vendors, helps contribute to child labor and "is really having a severe impact on quality of life." In 2011 she submitted a bill proposing making the purchase of such goods a misdemeanor crime, punishable by up to one year in jail or a $1,000 fine, and though it stalled for a bit, it resurfaced again this year.

The bill had a hearing in front of the Council's public safety committee yesterday, and faces opposition from the Bloomberg administration. "While we share the Council’s frustration with consumers’ misguided support of criminal enterprise, we are unable to agree with the approach taken by the bill,” said Kathleen McGee, director of the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement, said in a statement, noting that the heavy fine and threat of jail time might deter tourists from making legitimate purchases.

And some argued that vendors wouldn't know they were making illegal purchases. "My 70-year-old mother wouldn’t know a Hermes scarf from a Henry scarf," Karen Turner, Deputy Bureau Chief for the Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes’ Rackets Bureau, said yesterday. "How would you prove what my mother knew?" Then again, that "Michael Coors" bag (yes, spelled that way) for which you just plunked down a $50 outside the Canal Street J station? Probably not the real deal.