Fight against counterfeiting, the web is the goal

After 12 years as president, Carlo Guglielmi, opening the annual Indicam meeting, held yesterday in Milan, has announced he will leave this role − the successor will be elected by the new board of directors, elected at the same time during the meeting − reaffirming, in his speech, which is mostly on the web that every effort should be concentrated  with legislative and operational measures to curb counterfeiting.
The counterfeiting industry certainly does not publish their balance sheets, and therefore the estimates of the phenomenon of false are always inductive and down. Even more difficult to assess are then the damage of counterfeiting, including those relating to damage to the image, in addition to the loss of tax revenue and the relevant social costs. The assessment of the share of sales of counterfeit goods on the entire world trade is between 7 and 9 percent, and it is estimated that 250 billion dollars is the figure relating only to counterfeit products that, in some way, have crossed any border customs and in individual sectors, the figures may also be higher : 10 percent in perfumery, 20 per cent in textiles, 25 per cent in audio-video, 35 per cent in the software. More than 50 percent of the world production of counterfeits coming from the South East Asia, with a destination to the European Union by 60 percent, and China driving this particular ranking followed by Korea and Taiwan. If we look at the “European Championship”, the area from which 35 percent of the counterfeit production, the leading countries are Italy, Spain, Turkey and Morocco. As for the web, the traits most responsible for fake online is the anonymity of the offer, the ease in simulating the authenticity, the possibility to choose from a very wide type of virtual stores, the security of transactions (the meshes of the network, in fact, are usually sufficiently wide to allow the passage of small consignments). Born over 10 years ago, but in a scenario since then completely changed, the rules in force in the EU have not been able to consider the particular gravity of this phenomenon, or have predicted the exponential increase of counterfeiting (for many luxury brands, the incidence of counterfeiting websites can also approach 80 percent). What’s the suggestion of Carlo Guglielmi and Indicam? “It’s time to take action on national legislation and especially in Europe, to complete the picture in the light of experience gained in the meantime, starting from the current limitation of indiscriminate liability for Internet service providers and, more generally, of the service providers via the Internet“.