EUIPO Researches on Online Business Models Used to Infringe IP Rights
The European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) published the past July a report entitled “Research on Online Business Models Infringing Intellectual Property Rights” which aims, as its name reveals, to provide an overview of the different online business models infringing IPRs.
The study is in particular addressed to policymakers, civil society and private businesses with the purpose to help them better identify and understand the necessary responses to tackle the challenge of large scale online IPR infringements.
The material collected for the report mainly included publicly reported case law i.e. decisions taken by national courts and dispute resolution bodies such as domain name dispute panels, as well as cases that have been referred to in publically available reports and studies.
The report analyses 25 different online business models and all of them have been determined to be infringing IPR or susceptible of IPR infringement.
Among the analyzed business models we find, for example, cybersquatting, domain name parking and affiliate marketing, names which basically refer to domain names which contain a third party trademark without authorization, a very common online infringing practice.
For each business model, the study gives information about the infringer, about the revenue sources, and about, for example, the IPRs involved, resulting that 18 out of the 25 business models included trademarks and 17 included copyrights, although there are also examples of activities that involve infringements for instance of design rights.
It is also worth mentioning that from the 25 different analyzed business models, 8 refer to bitcoin as a primary revenue source. For those who do not know, bitcoin is a digital currency. The threat that Bitcoin represents, according to the report, is that there are no public records connecting Bitcoin wallet IDs with personal information of individuals, and this favors anonymity.
Finally, the report determines that if the IPR-infringing activities take place on a website that is controlled by the IPR-infringer, it is quite easy for a rights holder to initiate enforcement actions against the vendor either through court actions, filing of criminal complaints or thorough extra judicial enforcement mechanisms. However, these vendors often either conceal their identities by using privacy shield services for the registration of their domain names, or they provide false or inaccurate contact details on the website. This hampers and may sometimes preclude any initiative to enforce the infringed IPRs and stop the infringing activities, which means that we must continue attempting at finding solutions to fight against such infringing models and indeed this report will be very useful in this endeavor.
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