The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission has published the study Enforcers and brand owners’ empowerment in the fight against counterfeiting. The study is a joint initiative of the JRC and EUIPO, acting through the Observatory, assessing the use of advanced technologies to support the enforcement of intellectual property. Read more about it:
The study, carried out at the initiative of EUIPO, aims to map the technical solutions currently available on the market and their deployment in the protection of intellectual property rights.
The solutions will be for the benefit of brand owners who want to check the distribution of counterfeit goods that have an impact on their own brands in the marketplace, as well as other businesses – including SMEs – acting in the supply chain that are interested in having cost-effective tools to identify genuine products without having to use expensive and sophisticated control procedures such as forensic lab.
The study also addresses the needs of enforcers, namely customs and police, as well as market surveillance authorities, who want to check the validity of goods in the marketplace or in the customs area, making use of reliable and certified product authentication data and “track and trace” systems.
As an overall evaluation, techniques using smartphones, such as Barcode/QR code authentication appear to have now reached maturity on the market, with a cost-effective and highly accurate performance in identifying and authenticating a product.
However, the high level of market fragmentation calls for an effort towards the standardisation of practical solutions to optimise their deployment in IPR enforcement.
In this regard, the tools developed by EUIPO, which may provide the necessary data “library” to a standardised authentication system, could prove useful.
>> Get the complete Study HERE
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Source:
EUIPO News + JRC Study
