What's really at stake. The fight against industrial piracy and counterfeiting is making spectacular progress, but not fast enough to keep pace with the volume of counterfeit products. The debate has been extended. The recent press conference given by the vice-president of the European Commission, Franco Frattini, announcing the initiative which will make criminal sanctions obligatory (basically: imprisonment instead of the traditional fines accompanied by the seizure of the fake merchandise) has gone round the world, and journalistic investigation has proliferated. An essential element of this is the general acknowledgement that the problem is not purely an economic one and that the targets of the forgeries are no longer just the intelligence or the vanity of the consumer. The stakes are high in an entirely way: when the fake products are no longer just perfumes, watches, ladies handbags and clothing, but medicines, foodstuffs and aeroplane parts, it's the health and safety of people, children and the sick which are at stake. But how long has this column, on the basis of expert analyses and the statements of interested parties, been highlighting the changing face of piracy and its dangers? Today, investigations which, yesterday or the day before, would have laid emphasis on fake luxury products, are denouncing the real scale of the plague and going into depth on aspects which are less visible but all the more dangerous: the direct involvement of organised crime, close links with drugs trafficking and the trafficking in human beings, money laundering. And there has also been talk of links with terrorism.
The authorities, therefore, have grown increasingly aware of the sheer enormity of the threat and this is gradually filtering down into public opinion. All well and good. But it is not enough. I believe that the remedies, the counter-measures and the other ways of fighting the plague are still woefully inadequate; even the measures recently proposed by the European Commission do not seem, for my money, to be up to the scale of the problem. Certain ideas even strike me as laughable. For example, coming down like a tonne of bricks on the purchaser of a counterfeit product may do something to slow down sales of the ladies' fake handbags, but would be completely ineffectual against the real dangers. As Christophe Zimmermann, a Commission employee with responsibility for the fight against counterfeiting, put it in a recent interview (our translation), "in the trafficking of fake drugs, fake spare parts or fake food products, the consumer is the first victim (...). It is important for there to be sanctions, but this resolves nothing". He spoke of new techniques used by the fraudsters to sell their wares: "in order to hide their tracks, the goods may go round the world several times, trying to find the most permeable entry point to the European Union. The new routes may go via the Gambia or the United States. The techniques, too, have changed: real products are mixed in with the false ones, false floors are put inside containers". Checks and seizures and must be stepped up, but "paradoxically, we have been asked not to put the brakes on international trade". And looking forward, without any radical changes, Mr Zimmermann says that he is "very pessimistic", because "the forgers will not stop their activities, because there is too much money at stake".
Targeting the trafficking. It is the illegal trafficking itself that we must target: put more controls in place and stop taking the view that the interests which must be protected first and foremost are those of the traders (some of whom are, on occasion, complicit). You find 2 tonnes (!) of fake watches in a container? The entire consignment must be seized and checked. And if irregular trading becomes the norm, we must have the courage to block all imports of the product in question from the country responsible. There should not be a "hierarchy of standards" at the WTO: sanctions against piracy must be as radical and binding as those against obstacles to trade freedom. And we must apply the same rules to imported products as Europe imposes on its own producers, wherever these rules are justified by indisputable reasons: health, safety, the protection of children. How can we fail to grasp the scale of the danger to the entire European manufacturing industry, if it is internal production alone which is subjected to requirements which are deemed necessary? If this is the case, European producers will no longer be able to compete. An example of this, perhaps a very small one but instructive nonetheless, is the European Commission's recent proposal for a safety mechanism to be fitted to gas cigarette lighters in order to prevent their being used by children. The European producers have agreed to this on the condition that this standard will also be applied to imported lighters (it is worth noting that millions of lighters already coming into the EU do not respect the standard already in force, ISO 9994). If not, then it should come as no surprise to anyone if the European cigarette lighter industry disappears.
(F.R)