Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) are to be encouraged to take advantage of the protection offered by Customs and Excise against unfair competition from counterfeit, pirated or patent infringing imports.
Customs have decided to drop the Ј1,400 fee, which previously meant that it was mainly large companies which registered their goods in order to protect their intellectual property (IP) rights. Counterfeiting and piracy has been growing at an alarming rate in the European Union (EU) and, in 2001, almost 100 million articles were intercepted at the EU's external frontiers with an estimated value of almost Ј1.3 billion on the legal market.
