I'm sinful, I confess. And surprisingly enough, I had not a single doubt when buying a dress from, as it seemed, a famous manufacturer at a very nice price. "Liquidation of goods! Purchase! Sale!" the seller stirred up. I made the purchase. Before long, the paint from the new thing started coming off. How's that? I am now also a victim of fake. Moreover, it was my own free will. Nowadays, no one feels surprised with a coat coming apart at seams or shoe soles falling off, and the like. Today's global counterfeit market is estimated at almost 250 billion US dollars a year. Intellectual property results, consumer goods, foodstuffs, in particular, and cosmetics and business products like spare parts and computer chips are in the risk zone.
Every single buyer of "twin" products can hardly imagine that the shadow turnover inflicts a great damage to the country's economy and reputation. One would think it's just one blouse or just one pair of jeans. But what if it is not just one, but another one, and another one, and then, there's about thousands of them?..Besides, a low-quality product may be rather hazardous for one's health.
Experts name China, India, Thailand, Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan and Vietnam among the major counterfeit-producing countries, and Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore among the transit countries thereof. Most often, they copy brands from the USA, Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany and Japan. Undeclared goods get into the country through twisty roads and various transit points. Then, they fake documents, create Centres of counterfeit distribution and repack and relabel the products. Fakes can be transported together with legal goods in huge packages, or disguised under fake export and import declarations with changed product names, etc.
Of late, the transportation of fake parts and further assembly thereof at destination points has become popular. They can also send finished goods separately from their logos, packings and trademarks. It is obvious that there are more dodge traffickers in the countries with free economic zones, where there are more chances to squeeze through the links of the anti-counterfeiting mechanism of a particular country.
The Belarusian system of counteracting illegal trade has already made a good showing, but there are still some unresolved issues. They were recently discussed in Minsk by the participants of the Discussion Club of the "BelBrand" Association for Intellectual Property Protection. There was a talk of the liberalization of parallel imports, the harmonisation of legal norms in the EAEU countries, providing for responsibility for the illegal use of intellectual property items, the need for strengthening the role of public organizations and associations in protecting brands, counteracting the unfair competition, and promotion of Belarusian trademarks. Certainly, those of successful companies. Such as OJSC "BelAZ", an example given by Valentina Dynich: the company had quite a lot of litigations dealing with illegal "copies" of "BelAZ" quarry truck components. The top Russian fakers are imitators of our foodstuffs and dairy products. And while the sellers of pseudo-Belarusian goods gain up to 500% and more of profits, conscientious manufacturers lose hundreds of thousands US dollars and the opportunity to enter the Russian market. And even though our industry no longer saves on protection, the reaction of some enterprises is surprising: let God judge them, they say: "If we are faked, it means that we are noticeable, and it's about our high reputation anyway". In my view, this kind of reputation is dubious. "Unfortunately, our manufac-turers do not always strive to defend their copyrights and brands," states Igor Komarovskiy, Vice-Chair of the Standing Committee on Industry, Fuel and Energy Complex, Transport and Communications of the House of Representatives. "The country does have relevant legislation in place; they just have to observe it."
The 4th International Forum "Anti-counterfeit-2018" in Moscow fol-lowed the topic up. The forum resulted in a proposal to combat counterfeiting by introducing electronic certifica-tion of various products and thus trac-ing the entire "life period" of a product. Belarus and Russia also signed an agreement on the protection of intel-lectual property rights aimed to protect consumers of the two countries from counterfeit goods imported from abroad.