Report of the European Commission on Public Consultation on Due Diligence and Supply Chain Integrity for Intellectual Property Protection published

The European Commission published the report on public consultation results regarding mechanisms developed by companies in order to secure their supply chains and thus to protect their intellectual property, originally titled: "Due diligence and supply chain integrity for intellectual property protection“.

The European Commission ran this public consultation from 17 December 2015 until 13 May 2016; despite efforts made by the European Commission for as many stakeholders as possible to take part in this public consultation, a very small number of replies were submitted that form a basis of the study conducted.

Due to their extreme complexity, globalised supply chains have become vulnerable to various forms of disruptions, including the infiltration of IP infringing or very poor quality products.

The European Commission’s report indicates that 58.33% of stakeholders who participated in the public consultation are working with over 25 strategic suppliers and the majority of them request confidential information from their suppliers such as their sub-contracting practices, their key suppliers, employment conditions and the like, whereas only 41.67% of respondents request information on IP infringement history recorded by suppliers. As to the monitoring of supply chains, the majority of respondents established auditing of their suppliers in the way to audit environmental conditions, employment conditions, information and communication technology system and the like; however, none of them control licenses for other suppliers’ IP rights.

Furthermore, the report reveals that the majority of respondents do not use any auditing methodologies for IP protection in supply chains and that there is a low level of annual resources attributed to IP auditing in supply chains. The report also indicates that the majority of respondents had at least once identified IP infringement in supply chains. Only five respondents indicated that they use track and trace technologies to assist their supply chain auditing practices and/or to protect the IP in its products and processes, and the majority of respondents declared that they track the supply of their raw material inputs.

The report of the public consultation is available at the following link.

http://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/intellectual-property/enforcement_en
 

Datum novosti: 21/11/2016