Meetings of the CAPRI Working Groups

Towards a National Anti-Counterfeiting Plan

The persistence and growth of the counterfeiting phenomenon demand the cooperation and collaboration between public and private entities who can find a specialized forum in CAPRI Commission. This Commission counts on three specific working groups (for Regulation, for Statistics and for Awareness-raising) which perform a quicker response to current problems, that were recently studied in the context of a series of productive meetings held at the SPTO headquarters.

During the Working Group for Regulation meeting, on January 25th, the attendees analyzed:

• The impact of the reform of the Law of Criminal Procedure (LECrim) regarding the destruction of seized goods.
• The possible creation of a prosecuting attorney specialized on IP and the steps that should be followed to get it.
• The advisability of propelling IP inspections made by each EU Member State National Police. Currently, just Spain counts on a Police unit in charge of this kind of inspection.
• The confiscation at customs duty of those goods headed to third countries that infringe IP rights and the measures that should be adopted to guarantee a proper execution.
• The new initiatives in the commercial field: Mechanisms for lodging a formal complaint of websites that infringe IP rights and blocking websites with counterfeit products.

The Working Group for Statistics meeting, held on January 26th, focused on the following topics:

• The analysis of the methodology for counting and valuing confiscated goods.
• The need of unifying criteria in terms of goods valuing and avoiding duplicities during goods counting.

The week ended with the Working Group for Awareness-raising meeting, on January 27th, centred on the creation of a big advertising campaign to support the National Anti-Counterfeiting Plan launch. The group highlighted the importance of making customers aware that this is not just a problem with an economic impact, what can be deduced from the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) studies. There are also a social component (the seller of the counterfeit product), a consumer awareness component (if there is no demand, the problem is eradicated), a social problem (in the streets, policemen clearing thoroughfare) and mafias who use the selling of counterfeit products to launder money. This is an aspect that should be underlined because the FCSE announced that at global level the market of counterfeit products is bigger and more profitable than the markets of drugs and weapons together.