The European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights [1] develops tools and promotes best practice to enhance protection of this critical asset for companies and individuals.
The European Observatory [2] hosted by EUIPO provides accurate, impartial and verifiable information to help safeguard Europe’s knowledge and competitive edge in the global marketplace.
Building upon our success in managing the European Union trade mark and registered Community design, the European Union Intellectual Property Office now also covers matters relating to the enforcement of intellectual property rights.
Following a proposal by the Commission, which was backed by the European Parliament and the Council, the Observatory was entrusted fully to the EUIPO on 5 June 2012.
The Observatory is a platform-based body that brings public and private sector experts together in a dynamic exchange network. The Observatory works as a think-tank that gathers, monitors and reports crucial information to assist policy makers and authorities engaged in protecting and enforcing IP rights.
The Observatory’s core activities are:
- Raising public awareness.
- Delivering specialised enforcement training.
- Developing systems to gather, analyse, report and exchange key information on the scope and scale of and trends in counterfeiting and piracy in the European Union (EU).
- Providing evidence-based data to enable EU policymakers to shape effective IP enforcement policies and to support innovation and creativity.
The Observatory is the gateway to several Pan-European portals, such as IP Enforcement Portal [3] and agorateka [4], the European online content portal.
The IP Enforcement Porta [5]l is an EU platform for IPR enforcement matters. It serves as a secure communication tool between all related parties: rights holders (and/or their legal representatives), EU enforcement authorities, the EU Commission and its EU delegations around the world.
The agorateka [4] portal allows you to search national-level portals that link to legal offers online for music, film & television, e-books, video games and sporting events.
The Observatory also develops databases of publicly accessible orphan works [6].