West Sussex County Council: Counterfeiting

It is the illegal copying of someone’s products. It is the theft from someone, an individual person, small company or a multi-national business, who has worked to put their ideas together whether they are computer games, clothes, movies or toys.

We are increasingly finding inferior, illegally copied and often unsafe goods on sale to the public. The production or importation of these goods is by unscrupulous businesses or individuals capitalising on well-known company names and brands or the original work of others.

The practice of counterfeiting has serious adverse effects on traders selling genuine goods and is prejudicial to companies and individuals who legally apply their name to goods or who own the brands or the legal right to reproduce original works. It is estimated that as many as 100,000 jobs per year are lost in the UK and European Union because of counterfeiting.

And the result is that consumers often end up with poor quality or at worst unsafe products.