Customs officers and representatives of right holders held a training seminar on intellectual property
Customs officers and representatives of right holders held a training seminar on intellectual property rights protection at the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The event was attended by specialists from the North-West Customs Directorate, customs offices and customs posts located in the Northern Capital, the St. Petersburg branch of the Expert Forensic Service of the CECTU, as well as representatives of trademark right holders
Opening the seminar, Chairman of the Intellectual Property Committee of the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry Andrey Fedotov drew attention to the importance and relevance of the issues raised, aimed at countering the illegal import and circulation of counterfeit goods, and also spoke about the activities of the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry to assist organizations in providing effective legal protection and protection of their intellectual property.
Deputy Head of the Federal Customs Revenue Service of the North-West Customs Directorate Ekaterina Ladynina noted the practical value of such trainings for customs authorities and for right holders. Counterfeit products cause not only damage to right holders and producers of goods, but also to consumers who may become owners of low-quality goods. Violators often try to make counterfeit goods look similar to the original, including in order to be able to sell the goods at a high price.
– In the conditions of parallel imports, the import of counterfeit products (goods with illegally reproduced intellectual property of others) is not legalized, – said Ekaterina Alekseevna. – In 2023, the customs authorities of the North-West Customs Directorate seized almost 655 thousand units of counterfeit products.
Irina Terentyeva, Head of the branch of the Expert Forensic Service of CECTU in St. Petersburg, provided information about the competence of the service to conduct expert examinations of goods containing intellectual property objects
Experts and representatives of law firms that protect the rights of right holders, spoke about the existing experience in suppressing the importation and circulation of counterfeit goods in cooperation with the customs authorities of Russia and shared examples of court decisions of 2023. The lawyers pointed out that the courts drew attention to the need to conduct expert examinations in relation to the subjects of administrative offenses and to fix in the conclusions the difference between the examined samples and the original products
Participants of the seminar discussed successful strategies for protecting brands of consumer goods, children’s toys, cosmetics, auto parts, clothing and footwear
In the practical part of the seminar, representatives of right holders spoke about different ways of fixing distinctive features of original products on the goods and their packaging. Such features are known only to the right holders. They keep them secret from a wide range of people to exclude the possibility of using them by unscrupulous persons for copying and production of counterfeit goods
The experts showed the difference in the samples of original and counterfeit products presented for comparison by means of concrete examples.
The seminar was attended by representatives of copyright holders
<At the seminar, representatives of right holders assured that they value their reputation, are responsible to consumers for their products, are interested in detecting and combating the circulation of counterfeit goods and confirmed their readiness to provide customs authorities with information on the distinctive features of original products for use in their work