By Gie van den Broek, ECTA Anti-Counterfeiting Committee, LXA The Law Firm (NL) and Bartosz Krakowiak, ECTA Anti-Counterfeiting Committee, POLSERVICE Patent and Trademark Attorneys Office (PL)

Over the past years, various international institutions have hit the alarm regarding the undermining impact of counterfeit products on society as a whole. Counterfeiting costs jobs, it can endanger health, it can be interrelated with money laundering and funding of terrorism, in most cases, it is related to tax evasion. It hurts the economy and is theft of intellectual property in any case.

Counterfeit products find their way to consumers in a few online clicks nowadays.

This requires action and political courage to change the rules. With a set of conclusions under the name EMPACT (European multi-disciplinary platform against criminal threats administered by Europol), the Council of the European Union has now formally earmarked IP crime and counterfeiting as one of the priorities to be implemented in an operational action plan with an aim defined as follows:

'to combat and disrupt criminal networks and criminal individual entrepreneurs involved in IP crime and in the production, sale or distribution (physical and online) of counterfeit goods or currencies, with a specific focus on goods harmful to consumers’ health and safety, to the environment and to the EU economy.'

To find out more, please read here and here.

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ECTA is a recognised discussion partner for the most important public and political bodies such as EU Institutions, EUIPO, WIPO and other national and international organizations. Yearly official meetings with the European Commission, EUIPO and WIPO allow us to maintain a strong influence on the developments impacting our members as well as on future of intellectual property rights policy and regulation. ECTA was one of the associations which successfully joined their forces to convince the decision makers at the EU and national levels to list IP crime and counterfeiting as one of the priorities for Europol’s EMPACT.