This article appeared in The Intellectual Property Strategist, an ALM/Law Journal Newsletters publication that provides a practical source of both business and litigation tactics in the fast-changing area of intellectual property law, including litigating IP rights, patent damages, venue and infringement issues, inter partes review, trademarks on social media – and more.

The broadest remedy that the International Trade Commission (ITC or the Commission) can deliver under 19 U.S.C. §1337 (Section 337) is a General Exclusion Order (GEO), which blocks importation of all infringing goods regardless of source, even by importers who were not respondents in the ITC investigation. GEOs are more difficult to obtain than the more common Limited Exclusion Order (LEO) as they require additional proof either that an LEO will not be enough to stop the infringing imports or that there is a widespread pattern of violation of the asserted IP.

In recent years, the ITC has issued more GEOs than in the past. For IP owners facing infringing imported products from numerous elusive sources, a GEO can be a powerful remedy to tackle all infringing products at once. For importers of products potentially implicated by a requested GEO, the GEO can be a major threat even if the importer is not a respondent in the case.