More than a year after the outbreak of the pandemic, counterfeiting and piracy are rampant in Europe.
The business of illegal content on the web is worth almost 1 billion euros on the continent and Italy is first on the market for pirated films, with almost 58% of the market share in the whole Union.
As for illegal goods, they come mainly from China and Hong Kong.
These are some of the results of the latest study by the EU Intellectual Property Office (Euipo).
The pandemic and the consequent increase in online purchases and consumption of digital content have shed new light on the risks and damages deriving from the infringement of intellectual property rights in Europe, highlighting the dangers for consumers, highlights Euipo. On average, one in ten Europeans said they had bought counterfeit goods, also finding it difficult to distinguish legal sources of digital content from illegal ones, while over a third of Europeans questioned the originality of a product purchased.
The highest percentage of consumers exposed to misleading claims is recorded in Bulgaria (19%), Romania (16%) and Hungary (15%), while Sweden (2%) and Denmark (3%) have the lowest figures. In Italy, the population claiming to have been tricked into buying counterfeit products stands at 6%, below the EU average. Counterfeit products as a whole represent 6.8% of EU imports, worth 121 billion euros. Italy is one of the first destinations of arrival of counterfeit products by sea, with a share of the total volume of 12.8% of entries.