International Activities
Trademark Committee: Sends Delegation to INTA Annual Meeting
The 138th INTA Annual Meeting was held in the Convention Center, Orlando, USA from May 21 to 25, 2016, and more than 10,000 people from around the world attended the meeting. JIPA sent two members, Mr. Honda, Chairperson, and Mr. Naemura, Vice Chairperson, of the Trademark Committee, and it was the first time that JIPA participated in the meeting.INTA (International Trademark Association) is a global association aimed at protecting registered trademarks and related intellectual property to safeguard consumers and to promote fair and effective commerce. INTA is made up of more than 30,000 trademark practitioners and professionals from more than 190 countries. Its annual meeting is one of the world's largest IP events, in which the major countries' patent offices, patent attorney's offices, enterprises, and IP consulting firms hold sessions and/or operate exhibition booths.
Purpose of participation
The JIPA Trademark Committee attended the INTA Annual Meeting for the purposes of introducing activities of JIPA, making a presentation and exhibition in partnership with JPO to report the actual situation of anti-counterfeiting measures taken by Japanese companies, and building a network with other countries' organizations involved in anti-counterfeiting measures.Contents of JIPA's Activities
(1) Displaying counterfeit products in JPO exhibition boothWith the cooperation of companies to which members of the JIPA Trademark Committee belong, JIPA displayed genuine products and counterfeit products of shoes, USB memory sticks, batteries for cameras, airbags, golf clubs, and body lotions, and introduced samples of tools for determining counterfeit products, available from two companies. The unique exhibition of real goods made many people stop at the booth, and a total of more than 700 people visited the booth, which is above the number for last year. Visitors were particularly interested in the determination of authenticity, about which we received many eager questions from them. Through our demonstration featuring the difficulty in the determination by appearance and the method of determination using a label and a viewer, we reported the actual situation and challenges of anti-counterfeiting measures, and this was a good opportunity to ask for support in the future anti-counterfeiting activities.
In the JPO session, Mr. Kazuhiro Kimura, Director of the Trademark Policy Planning Office at JPO, made a presentation on "The Latest Status of Japan's Trademark System," followed by JIPA's presentation to provide an overview of JIPA and examples of anti-counterfeiting measures. Specifically, we introduced the current state of anti-counterfeiting measures of individual companies (e.g., governmental or criminal action, customs registration, authenticity determination seminars, Internet monitoring, alert to customers, and education of staff), and requested all quarters of cooperation. Above all, we emphasized in the session that Japanese companies are trying to find effective actions in spite of a restriction placed by factors such as budget and human resources, and this remark was published in an article of the JPO session on the next day's INTA Daily News with a photograph of Director Kimura. Thus, our presentation on the current state of Japanese companies' measures fully reached the audience.
