Medicine is one of the categories that increase the most, and as many as 20 million of the stopped products were assessed as potential threats to consumer health.

The piracy expert Kristina Fredlund at Awapatent sees both positive and negative explanations for the increase.

- The pirate industry is growing because it can be as profitable as drug trafficking, while the penalties and the risk of detection is still far too small, says Kristina Fredlund, lawyer and piracy expert at Awapatent.

The second important explanation for why more copies are stopped is, according to Kristina Fredlund, that all EU customs authorities cooperate ever more closely and that the industry is working actively to protect themselves.

Today, companies can make a single application for action across the EU and the national customs authorities exchange information continuously with each other, which makes the work more efficient.

- If you have a business and want to protect yourself against the copies, there are many things you can do.

To begin with you should go through your legal protection and your agreement that you are actually protected. Then you should submit an EU application for action and provide customs authorities with information so that you make it easier for them to stop copies of your products, says Kristina Fredlund.

Kristina Fredlund´s main advices to protect yourself against piracy:

Protect the products!
Make sure that your products are protected by trademark, design or patent protection both at home and on your other important markets.

Report to the customs authorities!
Submit a national or EU common application about intervention.

Help the custom duty to help you!
Set up clear instructions on how the customs authorities can identify genuine and fake goods.

New form or new products?
Investigate early on how you can protect new designs or new products legally. And do not wait until they have been launched - then it may be too late!

Keep an eye on suppliers!
Review your agreements with manufacturers so that unauthorized "overproduction" is sanctioned - otherwise you risk that your own subcontractors produce pirated copies.

Survey the pirates!
Seek help from your suppliers, partners, resellers and professional intelligence agents to find out where the copies are made, how they are distributed and where they are sold.

Seek advice from an expert!
For example, even if a custom tariff application is free, it requires expertise to create an effective legal protection.

                                                                                       Cecilia Helland