Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-12-17-Speech-3-480"
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"en.20081217.27.3-480"2
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"Madam President, can I firstly thank Mr Susta for his good cooperation on this report. We did not agree on everything but he was always very cooperative and as flexible as he could be.
Firstly, Mr Susta gave us some global figures on the scale of counterfeiting. Just this week in my constituency, two separate events have drawn attention to the scale of counterfeiting at the regional level. Firstly, the UK Border Agency raided a ship in Grangemouth in Scotland, in my constituency, and seized GBP 3.6 million worth of fake designer goods. The ship had come to Scotland via Holland from China.
Again this week in Scotland, it was revealed that so far this year, Scottish police have seized half a million CDs and DVDs with a street value close to GBP 5 million. The police went on to say in their press release that the distribution of these knock-off DVDs and albums was nearly all controlled by organised crime. So this is clearly a massive problem across the whole of the European Community.
As others have said, counterfeiting is often seen as a victimless crime, but of course, as we are discussing, it is far from it. There are at least three groups of losers for counterfeited goods.
The first group is, of course, the business community: trade affects legitimate retailers and other businesses who pay taxes, employ people and generate revenues; counterfeiting also denies authors, artists and researchers a fair return on their talent and investments. There are the customers that have been mentioned by Mrs Wortmann-Kool who are killed, harmed or inconvenienced by fake products. Then there is the third group of people, the victims of criminality and anti-social behaviour, which are often financed by the proceeds of counterfeited goods.
The PSE Group largely agrees with what the Commissioner has outlined as the three areas of action required to tackle this problem. Firstly, we need tougher action against third countries that encourage or turn a blind eye to counterfeiting and fail to protect the intellectual property rights of others. We do not believe that ACTA is the full solution to this problem and we certainly believe that, if ACTA is going to come into effect, we need it to be more transparent, democratic and generally multilateral. As Mrs Wortmann-Kool says, we see part of the solution as an international scoreboard naming and shaming those countries that fail to respect the rights of others as far as counterfeit goods are concerned.
The second area where we need action is the on-going work of law enforcement agencies such as the police, trading standards officers and customs authorities. We look forward to seeing the Czech proposal next year for better European cooperation in this field.
The third and final area is the need to educate the public about the damage done by counterfeiting, and to explain to young people that individuals who work to create films, TV content and music have a right to earn a living from it.
What we do not believe is that we should criminalise individuals who download the odd pirated song or pirated music or who buy a fake CD or fake football shirt. We do not want to criminalise these people; we want to educate them and get them on our side to tackle the real criminals in this process."@en1
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