2012 Report on EU Customs enforcement of IPRs published
The European Commission (“EC”) has recently published its report for the year 2012 on EU customs’ enforcement of intellectual property rights (“IPR”) in the European Union (“EU”). The report, published each year since 2000 based on data transmitted by the national customs administrations to the EC, gives some statistics which we summarize below on the number, type, provenance and transport method of counterfeit products detained at the EU’s borders.
According to the report, the number of individual items detained decreased from 115 million in 2011 to 40 million in 2012. Nevertheless, the total amount of cases (i.e. detentions of counterfeit goods by Customs) remained stable around 90.000. Postal and courier small packages (regarding mainly online sales) accounted for around 70% of customs interventions; with 23% of the detentions in postal traffic concerning counterfeit medicines.
China remains the primary country where the suspected IPR infringing goods are sent from. Other countries, however, are the top source for specific product categories, such as Morocco for foodstuffs and Hong Kong for CD/DVDs and tobacco products (mainly electronic cigarettes and liquid fillings for them). In most cases detained goods were destroyed or court proceedings were instigated to determine have the infringement ascertained. Only in a few cases the goods were released either because they appeared to be non-infringing or because no action was taken by the right-holder after receiving notification of the detention by the customs authorities.
As in previous years, the majority of articles detained by customs in 2012 were suspected of infringing a trademark. For design and model rights, items like toys, body care items such as razor blades or brush heads, watches and shoes were mainly concerned. As regards copyright infringement, the product categories most concerned were toys, clothing and CD/DVDs. Finally, medicines and audio/video apparatus were detained for suspected patent infringements.
The report shows that cooperation between customs and IPR holders has generally increased: in fact, the number of applications filed in the Member States rose from 1.671 in 2000 to 23.134 in 2012. In this respect, starting from 2014 the new EU Regulation on Customs Action (which we talked about here on this blog http://www.callegarimartinimanna.com/new-eu-regulation-on-customs-action-published/) will extend the range of protected rights and probably lead to a further increase in applications.