The European Union (EU) has removed the Philippines from its priority watchlist of intellectual property rights (IPR) violators as the number of complaints involving counterfeiting and piracy decline, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) said over the weekend.
The European Commission in its biennial watchlist titled the “Report on the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights in third countries” released on Jan. 8, 2020, said it will remain to closely monitor the IPR environment in the Philippines as it noted that “the situation has not improved over the last years” as a source of counterfeit goods.
The report removed the Philippines from Priority 3 category “• the least concerning of all three priorities “• to the “very few complaints received from stakeholders and the increase in the relative importance of other countries for EU right holders.”
Teodoro Pascual, officer-in-charge director-general of the IPOPHL said this is the first time the Philippines was delisted from any Priority category. Since 2015, the country had been a Priority 3, already a downgrade from its enlistment as Priority 2 in the years prior.
Priority 1 economies posing the biggest threat.
The watchlist ranks economies based on the level of concern and threat to the EU’s IPR holders.
But the report cited joint studies by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), which identified the Philippines as among the provenance economies which flooded the EU with counterfeits in a number of product categories such as leather articles, handbags, pharmaceuticals, footwear, games, toys, and sports equipment.
A provenance economy, in the context of counterfeit trade, is a source of a counterfeit good, without particularity on whether it is a producer or a point of transit.
IPOPHL disputed the observation of no improvement, as well as the accuracy of the OECD-EUIPO reports saying they were based on old data.
The previous watchlist report, released in 2018, commended the country for efforts we have been amplifying since then, particularly the push to amend the Intellectual Property (IP) Code of 1998 which is now in Congress and awaiting filing as a bill as well as for; IPOPHL’s continuous effort to champion several IP initiatives in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations; and the initiation of creating a National IP Strategy which the Office has completed and launched in December 2019,” Pascua noted.
As for concerns on the lengthy court process raised in the 2018 report, the IPOPHL has stepped up to fast-track the decision-making for IPR cases by collaborating with the judiciary to revise the current Special Rules on IP Litigation, a move that has been in the works for months now.
“However, we understand that the report monitored the situation only up to Aug. 31, 2019, after which several advancements in the local IPR environment worthy of merit were not credited.,” Pascua added.
