At WIPO, A Complex Fight Against Counterfeiting, Piracy

The fight against counterfeiting and piracy was at the heart of the World Intellectual Property Organization committee on enforcement. In a meeting of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) which 8^th session took place from 19-20 December., the delegates heard several expert presentations on ways to tackle infringement and measure its impact., also including: the quantification of economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods; media piracy in emerging economies; consumer attitudes and perceptions on counterfeiting and piracy; methods of disposal and destruction of counterfeit and pirated goods within the Asia-Pacific region; and IPR infringements and enforcement accounting for socio-economic, technical and development variables .

However, the smooth discussions on the meeting were disrupted by considerations of the future work of the committee.

At the meeting, WIPO Director General Francis Gurry stated that was delighted to see the number of delegations present and took it as an indication of the high importance of the subject matter.

At the end of each session of the ACE, the work for the next session of the committee is discussed and at this session four proposals were presented for the future committee work.

These included two submitted in December 2012 a proposal from Group B, calling for a study identifying the existence of initiatives targeted at school age students, to be presented at the 9th session of the committee; and a proposal from Korea, proposing that the WIPO secretariat conduct a study on practices and operation of alternative dispute resolution systems in IP areas, and whose results be presented at the 9th session.

On the meeting table were also two earlier proposals, one from Peru , submitted in December 2011 and updated for this session, calling for a study on the economic impact of piracy and counterfeiting, identifying preventive actions, measures and successful experiences, taking into account the different level of development of member states.

The fourth proposal for future work was from the Development Agenda Group, from December 2010, requesting a discussion on how to intensify and improve WIPO’s enforcement-related technical assistance, including legislative assistance with a view to preventing the abuse of enforcement procedures such as “sham litigation,” and legislative assistance in drafting national laws of enforcement that take into account the use of flexibilities as well as the different socio-economic realities and the difference in the legal tradition of each country.

The WIPO secretariat also presented a report on recent activities of WIPO for “building respect for intellectual property".