The trade in counterfeit goods represents an ever-evolving threat, both in scope and scale. The illicit trade in counterfeit goods poses significant risks to innovation, business efficiency, and consumer welfare, while also constituting a key source of revenue for organized crime.
For consumers, counterfeiting carries significant dangers to health, safety, and privacy and can also undermine the satisfaction of the unwitting consumer when the latter buys low-quality fakes.
For rightsholders and legitimate retail businesses, counterfeiting produces serious economic losses, and in the long run, lowers the value of the brand.
For governments, counterfeiting translates into lost revenue, higher unemployment, and higher expenses incurred to ensure compliance with anti-counterfeiting regulations and to address threats to public safety and distortions in the labor market. In the Italian case, as a modern, innovative and export-oriented economy, this is a particularly damaging phenomenon. Made in Italy" is, in and of itself, a valuable international brand and counterfeiters are aware of this.
The word counterfeiting is often used in the common language to identify different and not homogeneous phenomena. From a non-juridical point of view, the definition of counterfeiting could be made to fit the act of forging, which is attributable to the activity of those who produce something in such a way that it can be mistaken for the original.
From a juridical point of view, it is useful to specify that the concept of counterfeiting is a generic concept that recalls the idea of fraudulent imitation or falsification of any good, with the consequence that the incriminatory provisions concerning counterfeiting hypotheses are very numerous both within the framework of the penal code and within the one established by special legislation.
The cases of illegality that characterize this segment are increasingly important in our country.
A recent OECD study highlighted how Italy produces high quality products, gaining significant economic benefits from its intellectual property and brands. This makes it highly exposed to the damaging effects of counterfeiting, which directly affect rights holders and, indirectly, the entire "made in Italy" market.
The global trade of counterfeit and pirated products, in violation of Italian registered trademarks, reached in 2019 the figure of 24.3 billion euros, equal to 3.6% of the total sales of the Italian manufacturing sector (domestic plus exports).
The most affected sectors, in absolute terms, include: clothing, footwear, leather goods and related products, electrical and optical electronic products. In relative terms (as a percentage of total trade in a given commodity category), home appliances, electronic equipment, perfumery and cosmetics, clothing and house goods, cultural and entertainment goods such as toys, games, books and musical instruments, watches and jewelry were the most counterfeited products worldwide.
In recent years, counterfeiters have focused on key Italian manufacturing sectors such as apparel, footwear and leather goods, and optical products.
For example, the Italian clothing industry has lost nearly 10% of its sales due to counterfeiting of its products worldwide.
China, Turkey and Hong Kong (China) are the main countries of origin for counterfeit and pirated goods that infringe the IPR of Italian owners.
In 2019, the counterfeit products market in Italy reached a figure of 7 billion euros, corresponding to 2.1% of the country's imports. The intensity of counterfeiting in Italy varies considerably in relation to product categories.
Estimates of the damage caused to consumers in Italy by fraud on the primary market amounted to almost 6.7 billion euros in 2019.
The sales drop resulting from the counterfeiting market, in Italy, translates into lower revenues for the state, deriving from value added tax (VAT), corporate income tax (IRES), personal income tax (IRPEF) and social security contributions. In 2018, lost tax revenue from the retail and wholesale sector amounted to €1.7 billion, or 0.5% of total state revenue.
(Data source: "The trade in counterfeit goods and the Italian economy - OECD 2021)The activity of the Corps to protect the market of goods and services consists of actions to counteract the phenomena of counterfeiting of registered trademarks, usurpation of indications of origin and quality of goods, false statements concerning the correspondence of products to the required safety standards.
In these areas, during 2020, the operational departments carried out more than 5 thousand operations and implemented more than 2 thousand orders from the Judicial Authorities, reporting 2268 - of which 17 were arrested - and seizing about 157 million counterfeit industrial products, with false indications of Made in Italy, unsafe, as well as large quantities of food products bearing false trademarks or untrue indications.
The phenomenon of counterfeiting and product
safety, in the era of the global market is framed on an international scale and
is highly mutable.
Production and distribution strategies change, in fact, according to the prevention and contrast activities implemented by the competent authorities, but also in relation to the different socio-economic specificities of a territory.
Corps activity during 2020 was also geared toward combating the illicit marketing of infection prevention devices. This has led to the seizure of around 75 million masks and personal protective equipment, around 1 million packages and 160 thousand liters of sanitizers (sold as disinfectants), to the reporting of 1,585 individuals for crimes of fraud in commerce, sale of products with misleading signs, counterfeiting, receiving stolen goods, fraud and speculative handling of goods, and to the detection of administrative violations in 310 cases.
