Monday 23 September 2019

Memorandum of understanding on online advertising and intellectual property rights

A memorandum of understanding under which the advertising industry undertook to try not to advertise on websites or apps that contributed to copyright infringement or the "dissemination" of counterfeit goods has been renewed after a one-year trial period. (I don't think the word "disseminate" is quite right for the distribution of physical objects, though it derives from the Latin for "seed" which clearly is physical - and related to inseminate, which suggests to me even more strongly that it is not really the right word for the job.)

It also strikes me that using the word "counterfeit" is unhelpful. I'm not aware of any settled definition of the word, and my time in the motor industry taught me that one person's counterfeit is another person's independent replacement part (my friends at the Ford Motor Company were particularly expansive in their use of the word to describe just about anything not made by them that would fit one of their cars).

Details of the MoU can be found on the European Commission's website here. The Commission "facilitated" the MoU, as part of its "follow the money" approach to intellectual property enforcement.

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