SAN DIEGO

In speeches to his Latin American counterparts and other law-enforcement colleagues gathered in Brazil in late February, U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder sought to boost support for new laws to combat computer and intellectual-property piracy and counterfeiting in the region.

Clearly, more cooperation among the police forces and intelligence agencies in the U.S. and their partners in Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere in the region is needed. Mr. Holder’s visit should lead to much more integration, cross-training and prosecution of the criminals who steal ideas, take away incentives for research and development of new innovations and medicines, and profit from counterfeiting.

As growth in the global economy moves to emerging markets, such as Brazil, the challenges confronting legitimate businesses there will mirror those facing industries in the U.S. It is important that we reward the innovators of our new technologies and medicines as well as those who create art and entertainment and stem the funding to organized criminal gangs and terrorists.

Traditionally, it is the U.S that plays the major victim of the counterfeiting of music, films, video games, perfumes and pharmaceuticals. The U.S. Commerce Department has estimated that U.S. businesses lose $250 billion annually to piracy of software, music, movies, medicines, fashion, video games, perfumes and other technologies innovated stateside. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that piracy is responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs annually in the U.S. But no one is crying for Bill Gates and Madonna.

Brazil, the economic and political powerhouse in South America, is also losing out to this growing global menace. According to the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, music sales in Brazil fell more than 40 percent between 2005 and 2009, with a disastrous impact on investment in local repertoire.

In 2008 there were only 67 full-priced local artist CD releases by the five biggest music companies in Brazil, barely 10 percent of the number available 10 years before. Clearly, local talent loses out since there are few opportunities to record music with major labels anymore. Moreover, with some 50,000 retail outlets having closed in the country over the last decade, many jobs have been lost forever.

Not only the music industry in Brazil has suffered at the hands of pirates. Brazil has fallen prey to the production and distribution of fake clothing fashions, alcohol and other beverages, pharmaceuticals, DVDs and health and beauty aids, many of them Brazilian-originated goods.

In 2007, months before it was released in theaters, “BOPE: Tropa de Elite,” a major Brazilian film, made its way out onto the streets on DVDs, severely injuring its box-office receipts. Even allegedly cancer-fighting pharmaceuticals, but with none of the active ingredients to do any good, have been counterfeited by the vast network of Brazilian pirates, some of them discovered on sale in retail pharmacies.

In a raid a few years ago in Sao Paulo’s fabled pirated-goods marketplace Rua 25 de Marco, military police confiscated over a million counterfeited products — everything from fake brake parts to counterfeited razors and from perfume to cholesterol-fighting drugs were found. Clearly, piracy threatens the public safety in Brazil as it does in the U.S.

Criminal organizations, including terrorist gangs, have found these illicit industries highly lucrative in raising funds. Just last year, an al-Qaida operative was arrested in Foz do Iguacu, just over the border from the lawless Paraguayan city Ciudad del Este, the international epicenter for piracy and counterfeiting.

Hezbollah, Iranian-backed Lebanese militants, designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department, gets $20 million annually from pirating. The prosecutor’s office in Paraguay is inundated with cases involving Lebanese and Chinese businessmen who brazenly rip off Brazilian and U.S. filmmakers and musical artists.

Indeed, intellectual-property piracy is a continent-wide problem. It is not just the makers of culture in Brazil and the U.S. who get injured, but artists and innovators from smaller countries too.

With cheaper pirated copies of their works on sale on the streets from Asunción to Quito to La Paz, folkloric artists, writers and musicians cannot make a living or find publishers or distributors for their original works. National cultural patrimony is at risk of being lost forever in a sea of asphalt vendors that contribute nothing back to the originator of the work.

Indigenous groups, too, stand to gain from the enforcement of intellectual-property rights. The respective traditional knowledge of Latin America’s first nations — from rain-forest-based medicines to ancient crops for cultivation — have all been poached in the past by multinational corporations that register patents for their own financial statements.

Only a rules-based system of registration and enforcement can ensure that the profits from these technologies be shared fairly by the people who have developed them.

James Cooper is a professor at California Western School of Law, in San Diego, where he directs Proyecto ACCESO, which seeks to strengthen the rule of law in the Americas.