ANTI-COUNTERFEIT MEASURES
AN EFFECTIVE TOOL AGAINST COUNTERFEIT AND PIRATED GOODS: CUSTOMS MEASURES IN TURKEY
Turkey’s position as a hub between Europe and Asia makes it especially important in the struggle against counterfeiting. Customs applications are a useful weapon used by authorities in the fight to protect IP, as Oktay Simsek reports.
Turkey has a special global geographical location, at a crossroads of the flow of goods between Europe and Asia. Tis puts Turkey in a critical position regarding counterfeited goods traffic within the European Union (EU) internal market and the external markets, to where fake goods produced in Turkey are exported.
Te counterfeit market in Turkey is huge, although recently the police and customs authorities have worked together to prevent sales of counterfeits. Tere have also been various programmes to raise public awareness of counterfeits.
To effectively tackle the production and sale of counterfeited goods, Turkey amended its customs rules covering intellectual and industrial rights in 2009 and 2010 to comply with those in the EU.
Turkish customs authorities have simplified destruction systems, extended customs applications from one month to 12 months and created centralised customs application systems for IP protection at Turkish customs, replacing the practice of filing customs applications at each customs authority separately.
Turkish customs authorities have also arranged a number of training programmes for customs officials and controllers, and developed their soſtware capability to monitor customs applications more efficiently.
Despite these attempts, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report (2011–2012), Turkey is still ranked in 86
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out of 144 countries in terms of the quality of IP protection.
You can still see fake and imitated goods in daily life, which is mostly because of low purchase power, insufficient awareness about customer rights and lack of enforcement of the laws in due course, etc. Tese factors make Turkey a country in which IP owners need to protect their rights. Considering the intercontinental location of Turkey, customs applications are an effective tool used by the customs authorities to protect IP.
Customs applications and enforcement
Customs applications can be filed for intellectual and artistic works (copyrights), topographies of
integrated circuits, breeders’ rights of
new plant varieties, patent and utility model rights, industrial design rights, geographical indications, trademarks, supplementary protection certificates and other intellectual and industrial property rights.
Filing procedures for customs applications
Te customs applications can be filed
electronically at the Turkish customs authorities by using a specific form, namely Ek-13, or by using an electronic data exchange system. If the rights holder is located abroad, a representative specifically appointed by
an attorney or
authorised person (licensee, distributor, etc) can file a request on behalf of the rights holder.
Te rights holders can file centralised applications
for customs applications at the Turkish Customs Directorate. All the Turkish customs authorities can access the database every day.
Te application should cover information enabling the customs authority to identify the goods requiring IP protection. In this regard, it is important for the rights holder to provide any information to allow the customs authorities to easily recognise the goods during their routine checks.
Te customs application should cover:
• Technical details of the goods (eg, pictures of the products on a CD);
• Any information regarding the type of counterfeiting actions;
• Te contact information, including name and address, of the rights holder;
• Registration or grant certificate proving that the right is registered and protected in Turkey (letters
patent, registration certificate for trademarks, etc); and
• Te requested term during which the customs authority should take action. Te term cannot be more than one year.
Customs applications last no more than one year and are renewable at the end of the one-year surveillance period. Any customs application is concluded within one month of the application date by the customs authorities.
If the application is refused by the customs authorities, the applicant for the customs action can object to the refusal of the application.
World Intellectual Property Review Annual 2013 29
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