Gowers Review of Intellectual Property

(a) Are you aware of any inconsistencies or inadequacies in the way the law applies legal sanctions to infringement of different forms of IP or to different circumstances?
(b) For example, should criminal sanctions on online infringement be the same as those relating to physical infringement?

(a) Has your organisation experienced any activity linked to IP rights that you regarded as unfair competition?
(b) How did you deal with this problem?
(c) Was competition law effective at controlling this behaviour?
(d) Should competition law have a greater role to play in regulating IP?
(e) How would you see the system working?

Background: European law does not allow firms to use trade mark or copyright law to prevent their goods sold in one EEA Member State from being imported and resold in another Member State — i.e. they are not able to segment the EU market. However European law does allow the use of trade mark and copyright law to restrict the imports to EU Member States of goods sold outside the EEA. It also specifically inhibits EU Member States from legislating to remove such import restrictions at the national level — so called “international exhaustion” of trade marks or copyright. There has been a good deal of debate, both here in the UK and at EU level, about the costs and benefits of removing restrictions on parallel imports. There is a further issue of firms taking advantage of variations in prices on pharmaceutical products across the EU and repackaging drugs bought cheaply elsewhere within the EEA to resell within the UK.
(a) Has your company been affected by parallel trade?
(b) What would be the impact on your organisation of a change in the current rules?
(c) What evidence is there of the costs and benefits, both for consumers and firms of the current rules?