The Taxation and
Customs Union at the European Commission has recently published its statistics
for 2010 of customs data relating to the enforcement of intellectual property
rights (IPRs) across the EU.
The Customs Union
takes a robust approach to tackling the problem of counterfeit goods and
provides for Member States to implement enforcement measures via national
customs authorities under the Counterfeit Goods Regulation (1383/2003).
Member States are also required to provide details of any detentions of goods
made by customs involving infringements of IPRs under Regulation
1891/2004. This submission of information enables the creation of the
report and the breakdown of data shows interesting trends on an EU wide scale.
The report utilises
the data gleaned from, among other things, the number of cases, the number of
articles (i.e. the total number of individual infringing goods), and the
total domestic retail value of the goods, which is calculated on the basis of
what the goods would be worth if they were genuine. Read more here
