The infringement of intellectual property rights is a growing problem affecting not only entrepreneurs in the EU. While 27,000 cases of the suspected infringement of intellectual property rights were detected by customs at border checkpoints in 2005, this number exceeded 90,000 in 2012. The OECD estimates that the world economy loses approximately EUR 200 billion a year as a result of the infringement of intellectual property rights.
For this reason, the European Commission adopted an EU Action Plan relating to the infringement of intellectual property rights in the EU and a Strategy for the Protection and Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights in Third Countries, which aims to reinforce the protection of intellectual property rights and facilitate the process of enforcing these rights for injured parties.
The Action Plan focuses on the infringement of intellectual property rights in the commercial environment and introduces measures to facilitate the detection of such infringements and their subsequent elimination. The measures introduced in the Action Plan promote an approach based on tracking the flow of money, which deprives those who act illegally on a commercial scale of income, but does not penalise individuals who often unwittingly infringe intellectual property rights.
Through its measures, the Action Plan sets out to achieve the following main objectives:
- to engage the entities involved in dialogue (e.g. on-line advertising agencies and providers of payment services) with the aim of reducing profits from the infringement of rights on a commercial scale via the internet;
- to support a regime of due care for entities engaged in manufacturing goods with a high degree of intellectual property, especially in the form of training and consultations, in that a responsible audit of the supply chain of own activity aimed at detecting and preventing the impingement of intellectual property rights significantly reduces the risk of an infringement of these rights;
- to help small enterprises more effectively enforce their intellectual property rights by facilitating the enforcement of these rights at court. For this purpose, the Commission will first focus on national programmes to help small and medium enterprises access the judicial system directly;
- to improve cooperation between Member States and facilitate the exchange of proven procedures (best practices);
- to provide the authorities of Member States with an extensive training programme, so that it is possible to implement preventative measures against the infringement of intellectual property rights on a commercial scale through the EU faster and to identify barriers to cross-border cooperation.
The Strategy then mainly seeks to reinforce the protection of intellectual property rights in relation to third countries (i.e. countries outside the EU) and to prevent trade in goods infringing these rights.
Within the framework of the Strategy, the Commission proposes focusing on the following steps to reinforce the protection of intellectual property rights:
- to improve international regulation of intellectual property rights and ensure that trade agreements include adequate and effective protection of right-holders;
- to cooperate with partner countries in the form of dialogue on intellectual property rights and, through working groups, resolve system issues of intellectual property and fundamental deficiencies in their systems of intellectual property rights;
- to conduct regular surveys for the purpose of creating a list of “priority countries” on which the EU must focus its measures;
- to practically assist small and medium enterprises and right-holders through projects such as assistant services in matters of intellectual property rights, and at the same time to verify and improve the expert knowledge of EU and MemberStates’ representative offices in third countries;
- to provide third countries with suitable technical assistance programmes and increase awareness of these programmes (e.g. training, building capacity, consultancy, how best to utilise assets representing intellectual property).
Specific legislative and other measures in the context of the above steps will be progressively adopted and implemented in 2014 and 2015.
For more information, please contact our office’s partner, Mgr. Jiri Kučera, e-mail: jkucera@kuceralegal.cz ; tel.: + 420 604 242 241.