INTA Design Conference 2018: Fighting fakes at the border
More than 30% of customs’ counterfeit seizures in Europe take place on the German border, according to Klaus Hoffmeister of Germany’s central customs unit for IP.
Hoffmeister spoke about how border control is used to prevent counterfeit goods entering the European marketplace, alongside Carlo Alberto Demichelis from Italy’s Institute of Centromarca for the fight against counterfeiting (INDICAM) at INTA’s Power of Design Conference on Tuesday, February 27.
According to Hoffmeister, 34% of all seizures at European borders occur on the German border and customs is becoming increasingly important in the “fight against fakes”.
Customs is the first one to make contact with fake goods and can stop them being released into European markets, where they become a lot harder to track and remove, he said.
For rights owners, getting support from customs is a “very easy procedure”—they must fill in an application form (which takes around one hour) with the relevant customs department. A customs officer can then grant the application in approximately 2.5 hours “if it’s a good one”, he claimed.
However, Hoffmeister provided a caveat that applications must contain all of the relevant information. He said: “We are customs officers—we are very clever but we do not know everything!”
Customs doesn’t need evidence of infringement to prevent the goods from being released, as suspicion of infringement is enough.
Helpfully, once an application has been made and granted, all EU member states are informed about the problem and the goods are not released on to the market.
Hoffmeister added that around 80% of the counterfeit goods discovered by European customs administrations originate from Asia.
Demichelis stated that some Chinese companies file applications for designs which infringe popular consumer products or marks.
It’s a strategy that is being used “more and more frequently” in China, making it more difficult for legitimate brands to prevent counterfeits at the border without having to launch a legal action against the counterfeiter.
A further challenge for brand owners and EU customs is the changing nature of import routes and channels, making it harder to track fake goods and their origins, explained Demichelis.
He claimed that while Italy is among the top five producers of luxury goods and is one of the top markets for the goods, it also remains one of the top producers of infringing goods.
INDICAM has seen increasingly high numbers of ‘unbranded’ items which have been imported or locally manufactured and subsequently sold online in the last three years.
Demichelis, suggested that whenever an application to protect a design is filed the owner should always think about how the protection of it will be shaped, as well as the enforcement options accompanying the applied-for right. Ultimately a good “enforcement strategy is a combination” of these elements, he concluded.
INTA’s Power of Design conference finished on Tuesday, February 27.
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