The European Commission’s recently published its second Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. This list names websites and physical marketplaces located outside of the EU (but are often accessible to European consumers) that are reported to engage in, facilitate or benefit from counterfeiting and piracy. These activities undermine the intellectual property rights of innovators and creators as well as harming EU businesses and threatening jobs. Some of the products on sale threaten consumers’ health and safety.
The new edition of the Watch List aims to encourage the operators of these marketplaces to take action to stop intellectual property infringements.
The Watch List has four focus areas: websites providing copyright-protected content, e-commerce platforms, online pharmacies and physical marketplaces. According to the European Union Intellectual Property Office and the OECD, trade in counterfeit and pirated products amounts annually to around €460 billion worldwide. The European Union is particularly affected, with counterfeit and pirated products amounting up to around 6,8% of all imports or as much as €121 billion a year.
The European Commission intends to update the Watch List regularly and will use the Watch List to continue the cooperation with EU’s trading partners in the framework of intellectual property rights dialogues and working groups as well as in the framework of the ongoing technical cooperation programmes in China, Southeast Asia and Latin America. The Commission states that it will also monitor the measures and actions taken by the local authorities in relation to the listed marketplaces and service providers as well as the measures and actions taken by the operators, service providers and marketplace owners to curb intellectual property infringements.
Fighting counterfeited products and piracy is not a hopeless task, as we’ve been able to demonstrate many times to our clients. There are automatic tools available to crawl the web and monitor websites as well as online marketplaces for counterfeit products. We have also a network of associates in many countries that are able to register intellectual property rights and investigate alleged infringers. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
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