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From the Newsdesk

The Impact of Trade in Counterfeit Goods on the UK Economy

The UK Intellectual Property Office have just completed two interesting research projects looking at Trade in Counterfeit Products and the UK Economy (here) – Fake Goods, Real Losses and Challenges from Social Media for IP rights (here) The report was commissioned to estimate recent levels of counterfeiting within the UK. To understand the extent to which this is moving online, and gauge how it is helped to do so by social media platforms.

The study aimed to assess the scale, impact and characteristics of infringements. This covers six sectors: alcohol, cigarettes, clothing, footwear, perfume and watches.

The panel event to discuss these two papers will take place on 28th September at the Alliance for Intellectual Property, 2nd Floor, Riverside Building, County Hall, Westminster Bridge Road, London, SE1 7JA from 9.30am until 12pm

According to the IPO:

  • “There were many claims, from industry and government agencies, about the role that social media plays in facilitating IPR infringement and the scale and nature of the infringement was not clear from the responses they received from industry.
  • The current scaleable official data is based on seizures. This, combined with the lack of industry data and unverifiable claims, make it difficult to assess the current scale of infringement in general.
  • Limited research has been undertaken to assess the scale of infringement and monitor trends, with the key research in this area are the EUIPO’s sectoral reports and the OECDEUIPO report.
  • The social media platforms provided data on levels of IPR infringement identified on their platforms in 2015; notably Twitter’s data indicated a significant decline in claims for trademark infringement in the second half of 2015, whilst Google argued only a small percentage of ‘bad actors’ misused their services. Facebook data showed a clear increase in government data requests, although this was not broken down into the types of requests in the research period.”

If you would like to join a discussion please get in touch with Dave Humphries [email protected]

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