PAUL PARADISE

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Biography

Paul's book Trademark Counterfeiting, Product Piracy, and the Billion Dollar Threat to the U.S. Economy sold out the first print in in 5 months. His latest books are a novel (The Counterfeit Detective) featuring a private investigator who specializes in counterfeit products, especially knockoff designer apparel; his other book How Peer-to-Peer (P2P) File Sharing is Shaping the Internet is an analysis of P2P file sharing on the Internet.

Skills: history of counterfeiting, the ex parte seizure and the 1984 Trademark Statute, various industry case studies: motion pictures, music, cable, pharmaceutical. Expertise with identity theft, peer-to-peer file sharing.

Paul started out in the publishing industry. He was on the editorial staff of T.F.H. Publications, Inc. and authored seven pet titles as staff author--Gerbils, Amazon Parrots, and others. He moved to New York to pursue a publishing career with legal publisher Matthew Bender. He began freelancing in the area of law enforcement with articles in Police and Law & Order, and PI Magazine. For a two-year period he worked as a paralegal at a patent firm to explore a legal career. He was a member of the firm's anti-piracy unit, which handled counterfeiting enforcement for Polo by Ralph Lauren, Gucci, and many other high profile brands. This paved the way for a writing and eventually a platform as a speaker for the rising tide of trademark counterfeiting. He has written numerous articles on this business crime, which the FBI calls the "business crime of the 21st Century," including the January 1995 cover story for Electronics Now on cable piracy ("Signal Theft".)

Paul took his Masters degree in Library Science in 2002 and has twenty years experience in government records management. He has been employed as the Hudson County Records Manage in New Jersey for over ten years. He is responsible for the records management operations of over 20 departments, including Finance, Payroll, Register of Deeds and Mortgages, and others. His duties include inventorying, retention, and the destruction of paper records, as well as on-site and off-site storage. Paul has worked on State grant-funded inventorying and purging projects with many Hudson County municipalities. He has been involved in records disaster recovery resulting from Hurricane Sandy, as well as select archival projects. Paul assisted the Hudson County clerk to implement a grant for an Enterprisewide Document Management System (EDMS).

Skills: records inventorying, retention periods, document scanning, records coordinators, disaster recovery, archival projects.

Experience

Records Manager

Hudson County

August 2005 - present

Responsible for establishing a records management program in Hudson County and working with over twenty departments, including Law, Finance, Surrogate, Register of Deeds and Mortgages, County Clerk, and also provided records management expertise on a consulting basis to all of the municipalities in Hudson County. I set up a training program and trained over thirty records coordinators; worked with the State of New Jersey on records inventorying and diposals and also certification of the County's enterprisewide document management system (EDMS); diaster recovery caused by Hurricane Sandy; overseeing two on-site storage facilities and advising on off-site storage; working on state grants for records management.

Other

Publications

The Counterfeit Detective

Koehler Books

November 2015

The Counterfeit Detective (Koehler books, 2015) is a novel that introduces a private investigator who handles trademark counterfeiting cases, especially knockoff designer apparel. It is based in part on a real-life private inivestigator who handles trademark cases. This is a follow-up to my non-fiction book Trademark Counterfeiting, Product Piracy and the Billion Dollar Threat to the U.S. Economy (Praeger 1999, 2000). I am an authority on this business crime, which the FBI calls the "business crime of the 21st Century." I've written numerous articles and been interviewed on the radio for my expertise.

Check back later for some activity here. Thank you!

Anonymous asked PAUL PARADISE

Do you think modern technology makes counterfeiting easier for the criminals or is it better for those working to protect trademarks?

8/23/2016,
PAUL PARADISE replied:

Modern technology definitely makes counterfeiting easier and is what is behind the upsurge which started in the late 1960s. Trademark counterfeiting is not a new crime and dates back to the Middle Ages and the trade guilds; each guild by law had to have a distinguishing mark. Counterfeiting was widespread and the crime has always been in effect. The crime began to escalate thanks to many factors like the Internet, the global marketplace, containerization, the Information Age, containerization, to name a few factors. Modern businesses have fought back with better legislation like the Trademark Counterfeiting Act of 1984, the first U.S. law to address the crime, and with advances in security in packaging which certainly make counterfeiting more difficult. Security features like RFID and holograms are effective but can be defeated. The Internet is the best example of a technology that has devastated the industry. Newsweek Magazine did a story in its September 25th issue on prescription drug fraud which is essentially out of control, as much as 50% in some third world countries and becoming a problem in industrialized countries. The Internet has devastated the entertainment industries. The music industry has seen its revenues shrink by about 50% since Napster came onto the scene in 1999. One of the few success stories is cable piracy. The industry began scrambling its signal to stop widespread piracy starting in the 1980s but finally came up with an encryption that was too costly to defeat.

@paulrparadise

Hudson County Records Manager

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