Little data on effectiveness of regulation against counterfeit goods and piracy

The Dutch Court of Audit has voiced criticism about the way that customs measure how effective they are in enforcing intellectual property.

The European Union is a popular destination for counterfeit. Although reliable data on the size of the market is unknown, the annual turnover in counterfeit goods is estimated to be hundreds of millions or possible even billions of Euros. Although only a small portion is meant for the Dutch market, the port of Rotterdam and Schiphol Airport play a key role in its transit.

Dutch customs works professionally while tracking counterfeit goods, write the authors, but are often less than perfectly aware of the degree of which they attain the goals of the enforcement policies. That is mainly due to limited insight into the scope of the problem and working with incomplete data.

On the subject of reporting and accounting, the performance of multiple organisations leaves something to be desired, the authors say. Customs sometimes makes invalid comparisons and different categories are unjustly summed. Although these flaws are known with the organisations involved, they nonetheless use the data for evaluations and formulating new policy.

This problem is by no means limited to The Netherlands. On the European level, too, a good grasp of the effectiveness of policy is lacking. The European Commission is not very forthcoming with comprehensive data and member states use different definitions in their measurements. The Court of Audit calls this the main challenge for the new European Observatory on counterfeiting and piracy. “The success of the European Observatory depends on the availability of complete, reliable and comparable data from member states.”

In a reaction, the Ministries of Economic Affairs and Finance announce to work together in improving the enforcement of intellectual property. Furthermore, the minister avows to tackle the lack of reliable data and to work according to European standards wherever possible.

12 February 2010