A bill that materially changes what a brand owner can learn from a border seizure has cleared Congress. H.R. 4930 — carrying the plain long title “To expand the sharing of information with respect to suspected violations of intellectual property rights in trade”, and referred to by industry as the Customs Notification Act — passed the House of Representatives on 27 April 2026, was received in the Senate the following day and referred to the Committee on Finance, and was taken up and passed by the Senate in the week of 10 November 2026. The Government Publishing Office published the enrolled text on 13 November 2026. Comparing the enrolled bill against the House-passed engrossed version shows the operative text is identical word for word; the Senate made no amendment, so there is nothing to reconcile and the measure now awaits the President’s signature. The American Apparel & Footwear Association welcomed the vote, with president and chief executive Steve Lamar urging the President to sign.
The Act is a short, surgical amendment to a single provision: section 628A of the Tariff Act of 1930, codified at 19 U.S.C. § 1628a and added by the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 (Pub. L. 114–125, title III, § 302(a), 24 February 2016). Four changes matter. The trigger for disclosure moves from the Commissioner “suspects” a violation to the Commissioner “has a reasonable suspicion” of one. The categories of physical evidence CBP shares expand beyond the merchandise and its packaging and labels to include packing materials and containers, in both the information and the unredacted images limbs of subsection (a)(1). A new subsection (a)(3) permits CBP to provide nonpublic information about the merchandise generated by an online marketplace or similar platform, an express consignment operator, a freight forwarder, or any other entity playing a role in the sale or importation of goods into the United States, where that information has been provided to, shared with or obtained by CBP. And a new subsection (a)(4) obliges CBP, when it hands over such nonpublic information, to notify the recipient of what was transmitted, in accordance with regulations the Secretary may prescribe.
The real prize is upstream attribution, not the parcel
Under the existing statute, what a rights holder got from a suspect shipment was essentially the shipment itself: information appearing on the goods and their packaging, unredacted images, and, at CBP’s discretion and subject to bonding, samples. That is enough to confirm a product is counterfeit. It is rarely enough to identify who is behind it. Subsection (a)(3) changes the character of the disclosure from product evidence to supply-chain evidence. Marketplace seller records, consignment manifests and forwarder paperwork are the material that connects one intercepted parcel to a seller account, a consolidator and a repeat shipper — the chain that turns a seizure into a named defendant, a platform takedown with teeth, or a credible John Doe application.
That reframes the internal value of border enforcement under the Customs Notification Act. A programme previously justified as loss prevention becomes an intelligence feed, and it should be resourced and routed accordingly. The practical question to settle now is who receives and reads that data: a seizure notice that lands with a logistics or compliance inbox and is filed will waste the very material the Customs Notification Act was passed to release. Note also the drafting asymmetry. The original subsection (a)(1) disclosure is mandatory — CBP “shall provide”. The new nonpublic-information power is permissive: CBP “may provide”. Expect to have to ask, and expect inconsistency between ports until practice settles.
The gate the bill does not touch
This is the part to check before counting on any of it. Subsection (c) of § 1628a is unamended, and it limits the whole of subsection (a) to merchandise suspected of infringing a trademark or copyright that is recorded with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Recordation is a separate filing from USPTO registration, made under 19 C.F.R. part 133. Under § 133.1(a), the marks eligible for recordation are those registered with the USPTO — expressly excluding marks on the Supplemental Register under 15 U.S.C. § 1096 — and only “if the registration is current”.
Three consequences follow, and all of them are portfolio work rather than litigation work. First, a brand with a strong US registration but no CBP recordation receives none of this; the expanded disclosure is invisible to it. Second, a mark sitting on the Supplemental Register — a common resting place for descriptive marks that were pushed there to get a registration at all — cannot be recorded, so the goods it covers cannot generate a recordation-based disclosure no matter how obviously counterfeit they are. If border intelligence matters to a product line, that is an argument for working the mark onto the Principal Register, through acquired distinctiveness or a reworked filing strategy, rather than leaving it where it is. Third, the currency requirement means a lapsed or cancelled registration quietly switches off the recordation that depends on it. A missed section 8 declaration or section 9 renewal no longer just costs the registration; it closes the information channel at the border too, which is a reason to keep recordation renewal dates in the same docketing system as the underlying maintenance deadlines rather than in a separate customs file.
Who counts as a recipient has widened
Subsection (b) previously defined a closed list of people entitled to receive information: the owner of the trademark alleged to be copied or simulated for goods suspected of violating 19 U.S.C. § 1526, and the relevant copyright owner for goods suspected of violating 17 U.S.C. § 602 or the anti-circumvention provisions in § 1201(a)(2) and § 1201(b)(1). The Act adds a fifth category: any other party with an interest in the merchandise, as the Commissioner determines appropriate. For groups where the registration sits in a holding company while enforcement is run by an operating subsidiary, a master licensee or an exclusive distributor, that is the provision to watch — it creates room for the entity that actually investigates to receive the data directly, instead of routing everything through the registrant. It is discretionary, so the sensible preparation is to make the enforcement contact on the recordation match the entity you would want CBP to deal with.
What to do before the regulations arrive
Two timing points before the Customs Notification Act bites. The notification duty in (a)(4) runs “in accordance with such regulations as the Secretary may prescribe”, so how and how quickly recipients learn what was shared is unwritten; the benefit is not self-executing on signature. And subsection (d) survives intact: CBP may withhold where disclosure would compromise an ongoing law-enforcement investigation or national security, which is precisely the posture of the organised-counterfeiting cases where supply-chain data is most valuable. Treat the new power as a strong presumption with a real exception, not an entitlement.
The useful work this month is unglamorous: reconcile the live US registrations against what is actually recorded with CBP, confirm each recordation’s registration is current, flag Principal-Register gaps on the product lines that get counterfeited, and fix the recipient entity and contact. The Customs Notification Act will reward portfolios that have done that reconciliation and give nothing to those that have not.