创新及科技解决方案

解决方案描述

Customs are responsible for about 70% of all seizures of counterfeit products in the world. The role of customs is especially important in protecting the Hong Kong because the vast majority of counterfeit products are imports and, after entering the market, subject to free circulation within the community. However, in anti-counterfeiting customs role is more supportive than proactive, which means that customs mostly provide help to trademark owners to protect their IPRs when this is requested.

Customs authorities fail to seize large amounts of counterfeits either because they do not know how to recognize the fakes or because the process of gathering statements from trademark owners is too time-consuming. Proper labelling, overt anti-counterfeiting technologies and training in recognizing counterfeits would, for example, assist officials in enforcing the IPRs of affected trademark owners. Furthermore, the lack of information sharing is often perceived to be one of the main obstacles in the fight against counterfeiters. Finding counterfeit products is one part of customs responsibility to control the trade. Other control objectives include finding various kinds of dangerous materials. While controlling the trade, however, customs also work to facilitate the trade in order not to disturb import and export. These two objectives conflict and thus customs always have to balance the trade-off between control and facilitation. Taking into account also the fact that the vast majority of goods that pass through customs are legal and thus should not be disturbed, it can be seen that finding counterfeit goods is not among customs' top priorities.

Fortunately, development in technology has also enabled novel countermeasures. Most notably, the emerge of radio-frequency identification technology has opened many opportunities to fight illicit trade. NFC allows for identification of tagged objects and establishes a link between the physical world and a virtual world with a mobile phone at any place and time. This so called dual existence of objects enables a number of new ways to manage the physical world, and thus NFC is being used for example to automate many supply chain processes.