Fraud and intrusions: Counterfeiting
Discover what intellectual property theft means for your business and how we can help protect against counterfeiting.
What is counterfeiting and how do you protect against It?
Counterfeiting is one of
Fraud and intrusions: Counterfeiting
Discover what intellectual property theft means for your business and how we can help protect against counterfeiting.
What is counterfeiting and how do you protect against It?
Counterfeiting is one of many forms of modern-day piracy. It knows no bounds, being present both in the real world and the digital one, and involves the imitation of genuine goods, on occasion, even the outright theft of intellectual property. This scourge can wreak havoc on any business - irrespective of its size.
How does counterfeiting work?
What is counterfeiting but the imitation of a genuine product? There isn’t one specific type of counterfeiting practice deployed. What is a forgery compared to, say, intellectual property theft? Forgery is the act of producing a “replica”, an imitation product, and when we discuss forgery, we’re often referring to money.
By contrast, intellectual property theft might mean that a rival has hijacked your idea and is developing their own cheaper, imitation version of your product. It may also mean that a rogue trader (or a person) has copied your product and made it available online for free, cutting off any revenue you would legally be owed for selling your product. While quite different in terms of how they work, they are both commonplace examples of counterfeiting.
Counterfeit products are everywhere
You don’t have to look hard to find counterfeit products, such is the enormity of the industry. Physical markets may be littered with fake clothes that may have conveniently “fallen off the back of a lorry”, whether the trader knows it or not. If you’re old enough, most of you will remember someone who had the latest bootleg DVDs and CDs, ripped and copied straight to a blank disk which they sold for far less than the original.
You can also find counterfeit products online. Counterfeit cosmetics are regularly sold on offshore websites, and it is rare for Swedish consumers to be satisfied with the product that arrives. You’re no doubt aware of movie and music piracy, too. You can go back to the days of dodgy DVDs and P2P platforms such as Kazaa and Napster, modern torrent sites like Kat.Ph or The Pirate Bay, direct download services like Mega, or even Google Drive; counterfeit, stolen, imitation and bootlegged products are and always have been widely available, and often freely so.
Counting the costs of counterfeiting
Some consumers may find it rather convenient to snap up the latest episode of their favourite television show, a cracked copy of your company’s software, or a knock-off, imitation shirt for peanuts. However, there are real economic consequences to counterfeiting, and we should not underestimate those.
Counterfeiting and bootlegging involves the breach of copyright, deliberate imitation and theft of a design, ignorance of a trademark, or copying a patent